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A Southerner in Europe 



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BEING FOURTEEN NEWSPAPER LET- 
TERS OF FOREIGN TRAVEL WRITTEN "^Slh^: 
WITH ESPECIAL REFERENCE TO ^" 

SOUTHERN CONDITIONS :: :: :: :: 



BY 

CLARENCE HAMILTON POE 

Editor and Manager The Progressive Farmer and Southern Farm 

Gazette, and Joint Author of "Cotton: Its Cultivation, 

Marketing, Manufacture, Etc." 



MUTUAL PUBLISHING COMPANY 
RALEIGH. N. C. 






LlBHARYof QGNGRESS 
Two Oopies Received 

DEC 26 !908 

' Ciipycikiri; £niry 

GLASS c^ XXc, Ho, 

COPY y. 



COPYRIGHT 1908 

BY 

CLARENCE HAMILTON POE 



DEDICATION: 
TO ALL ALERT-MINDED SOUTHERNERS 

WHO FIND 

LESSONS FOR OUR TIME IN THE HISTORY 
OF OTHER TIMES. AND FOR OUR COUNTRY IN 
THE EXPERIENCES OF OTHER COUNTRIES 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER. PAGE. 

I. — Back to the Old Ancestral Home: A 

Foreword „ 6 

II. — Notes of Passage Across the Atlantic 12 

III. —England and Scotland: A Fair Land 

Let Down from Heaven 17 

IV. — English People, Cities, Agriculture and 

Postal System 25 

V. — Glimpses of English Life and Customs-. 36 
VL— Among Castled Walls and Palaces Old 

in Story „ „ 49 

VII — "The Pleasant Land of France" 60 

VIII.— At Napoleon's Tomb and the Old Court 

of Versailles . 70 

IX. — Belgium, Holland, Germany: Countries 

Where Everybody Works 79 

X. — Wise Economies America Should Learn 

from Europe 90 

XL — Switzerland : Two August Weeks Among 

Lakes, Peaks and Scenei-y Unrivaled 99 

XII. — " The Grandeur that was Rome" 109 

XIIL— What Rome and Pompeii Can Teach Us. 118 
XIV. — How the South May Win Leadership: 
Some Practical Lessons from Euro- 
pean Life and History 129 



I. 

Back to the Old Ancestral Home: 
A Foreword. 

New York City, N. V. 

Here I am in New York, and to-day our ship 
will start to take me across the broad Atlantic — 
morning, noon and night; morning, noon and 
night, and morning, noon and night again and 
again for eight days, possibly nine, with all the 
speed of throbbing and powerful engines, riding 
on the billows of an unfathomed sea, until the 
shores of old Scotland at last come into view. 

Going across the ocean is not a matter of much 
moment now: accidents by sea are probably few- 
er in proportion to traffic involved than accidents 
by land, and the number of Southerners who go 
abroad is probably increasing three times as rap- 
idly as the population. 

But with all the ease of ocean travel now, I 
wonder how many start across without some 
thought of those three little barks that set out 
across the misty and mysterious deep from ■ the 
little port of Palos in 1492? 

Ever since the dawn of creation, through ages 
and ages, aeons and aeons, the great Atlantic 
had lashed itself with furious storms, had wearied 
itself with never-resting billov/s, — generations 



6 

coming and going; empires rising and falling, — 
while no man took up its perpetual challenge to 
search out the borders of its mighty realm. Cen- 
turies came and v/ent, and yet it guarded its se- 
cret of a Newer World; the Indian on this side 
not even dreaming that the sun looked down on 
any other land, and the European held back by 
superstition and by dread from attempting to an- 
swer the Sphinx-like riddle of the mighty waters. 

EUROPE IS NOT A FOREIGN COUNTRY; IT IS 
OUR OLD HOME. 

This is one of the thoughts that come to mind 
as we join in now with "those that go down to 
the sea in ships": that it is only in the last half 
hour of human history, as it were, and only in 
the last minute of time, comparatively speaking, 
that man has brought the sea under his dominion, 
making it his servant to carry him from conti- 
nent to continent. 

Moreover, it is also only in the last half hour 
of human history that there have been any white 
people in America. Europe isn't really a foreign 
country: it is our old home. This is the idea I 
should like especially to impress upon my read- 
ers; and it seems to me that in our educational 
system we make a mistake in dealing only with 
what these last three or four generations have 



done here in America and ignoring the long and 
weary upward course of civilization through 
centuries of European history — just as if a son 
inheriting a princely fortune and an ancient and 
honorable name should migrate to a new coun- 
try and yet fail to teach his children anything of 
the struggles by which his ancestors had de- 
veloped their sturdy virtues or acquired their 
broad possessions. Every liberty of which we 
boast, as Tom Watson points out in his "Story of 
France," was cradled in Europe; it was over 
there that martyrs bled for the rights that we en- 
joy to-day, and that patient generations slowly 
wrought out the principles of government which 
have made us a happy people. 

AND THE EUROPEANS ARE ALL OUR KINS- 
FOLK. 

Really, therefore, as I have indicated, I am go- 
ing back to our old home, — much as if the son 
or grandson of one of your uncles who went out 
to California in the gold-hunting days of '49 
should come back now to see his relatives and 
the ancestral dwelling-place. 

These men and women of Europe to-day are 
all our kinsfolk, even if we have let the relation- 
ships become indistinct and uncertain. It was in 
most cases only some chance, accident or whim, 



or at most, some change of policy in government, 
that caused our ancestors to come to America: 
.with a slightly different turn of Fortune's wheel 
you and I to-day would he Europeans, too. 

And even as it is, we cannot he indifferent to 
European history, nor find its pages meaningless 
for our times. 

Have you ever thought of it, that your an- 
cestors — the men whose blood now courses in 
your veins — played some part in the whole mighty 
drama of the ages? 

When Caesar conquered Gaul, your ancestors 
and mine, wild, ferocious men, heard somewhere 
the tramp of the Roman legions. 

In the struggle between the old gods of my- 
thology and the new and strange religion of the 
Christ of Galilee, your ancestors and mine were 
ranged on one side or the other. 

When the days of the martyrs came, it was our 
blood that ran in the veins of those who suffered 
at the stake or of those who applied the burning 
torch. 

And as I look back through the dim centuries 
to where Peter the Hermit stands amid those 
strangely 'dressed men and women preaching a 
crusade for the rescue of the Holy Sepulchre, I 
know that my fathers and yours, either as mailed 
knights or as hard-featured and hard-living peas- 



9 

ants, listened to the orator's fiery words and left 
home and loved ones to fight the hated Turk. 

Through the nightmare of the Dark Ages, 
through the long years of feudal authority, in the 
bloody and fruitless wars that followed, what 
part did these kinsmen and kinswomen of ours 
play? There is the great castle with its towers 
and battlements — and alas! with its dungeons, 
too! Did your kinsfolk and mine know the sun- 
nier side of life in the days when knighthood was 
in flower, or did they know only the peasant's 
bitter toil and dirty hovel — or perhaps torture 
and imprisonment itself? 

EUROPE'S LARGER PERSPECTIVE SHOWS 
THAT THE WORLD IS GROWING BETTER. 
One thing at least a European trip and a sur- 
vey of European history should do for a man: it 
ought forever to cure him of pessimism about the 
progress of the race. The curtain rises upon a 
stage of barbarism so fierce that the old Norse 
warriors on their forays are reported as finding 
especial delight in tossing captive infants from 
spear's point to spear's point. The boasted glo- 
ries o*f "the age of chivalry" become but a mock- 
ery when we recall that in its damp dungeons the 
limbs of innocent prisoners often rotted off, and 
that even the knightly vow to honor women ap- 
plied only to those of gentle birth. We have to 



10 

look back but a few centuries to the time when 
men thought they did God-service by burning to 
death all with whom they disagreed about re- 
ligion. 

And even existence itself in those days was 
hard and unlovely. So crude were the tools in 
use and so ineffectual the farm methods that even 
with good government the masses would have 
been in want such as no class of people in the 
South knows to-day: a thirteenth century writer, 
for example, reporting that the average harvest 
was only threefold the seed. But even this 
meager product was subject to grievous taxes to 
support more or less worthless kings and vicious 
courts until just prior to the French Revolution 
it is said that one-half of all the peasant earned 
was paid to the Government in actual taxes, and 
that after paying the additional feudal dues and 
church tithes, only one-fifth of his earnings was 
left him for the support of himself and family. 

THE TRUTH ABOUT ''THE GOOD OLD DAYS." 
The scroll of European history unrolled before 
him, one looks back, too, to the time when the 
lives of men and women were at the unquestioned 
disposal of lord or monarch; when at the nod of 
some one in authority your ancestor or mine per- 
haps was hurried away to wear out his life with 
cause untried in some loathsome dungeon; and 



11 

when men thouglit it the natural thing to die in 
wars in .which no one but the king himself had 
any interest. 

Contrasting this picture with that of present- 
day American freedom, who can doubt the great 
truth uttered by Bishop Fitzgerald — that "the 
progress of humanity under the rule of an all- 
wise, ail-gracious, all-loving God, is forward, not 
backward"? 

TWO BIG FACTS TO KEEP IN MIND. 

It is these two or three thoughts then that I 
would have my readers keep in mind in connec- 
tion with the articles that I shall write — 

First, that we are ourselves the inheritors of 
the long years of old European history no less 
than our kinsfolk who now live there — just as 
the son who moves away, no less than the son 
who stays at home, is the heir of all the family 
traditions that preceded his departure. 

Second, that these English and German and 
Scotch and Dutch and French are our kinsfolk 
left at the old home, and that so large a part of 
the real history of our race has been made with- 
in their borders that American history really 
deals, as I have said, only with the last half-hour 
of human progress. 



II. 

Notes of Passage Across the Atlantic. 

On board S. S. Caledonia, Avchor Line. 

This is the second day of July, so the menu 
card in the steamer dining-room tells me, and so 
say all well-regulated calendars, but it doesn't 
seem right to put a July date line over a letter 
when 1 have spent the morning with my winter 
coat on, my winter overcoat, and one blanket 
(steamer rug) securely wrapped around me — ■ 
while the only thoroughly warm and comfortable 
moments spent in my steamer chair to-day were 
after a fellow-passenger had thrown a second 
blanket over me! 

It's as cold here now as it is in the South in 
mid-November with cotton-picking in the day- 
time and 'possum hunting at night: cold enough 
for late muscadines to be gone and for persim- 
mons to be giving promise of the time for mak- 
ing 'Simmon and locust beer again. I could hard- 
ly believe before I left home — not even when it 
was established out of the mouths of two or three 
witnesses — that I should need a heavy overcoat 
in crossing the ocean in July, but I find, in fact, 
that the only thing more comfortable than one 
overcoat, would be two overcoats. 



13 

IN THE FOGS OFF THE "BANKS" OF NEW- 
FOUNDLAND. 

It's colder, of course the way we have come: 
the "Northern route," as it is called, landing us 
in Scotland. After leaving New York we skirt 
the New England coast and keep to the northeast 
until we go through the "banks" off Newfound- 
land. This puts us so far north that the aurora 
borealis or "northern lights" are plainly visible, 
as they were last night and night before. 

These "banks," as most readers know, are sub- 
ject to terrible fogs, fogs so dense that vessels 
can be seen only a short distance away, so that 
if our steamer did not sound its fierce and terrible 
fog horn every four or five minutes for hours at 
a time sometimes, there would be serious danger 
of running into some small and unsuspecting fish- 
ing craft. It has been but a short time since 
such an accident did really occur here: a great 
steamer dashing through the mist upon a small 
fishing boat, with the result that seventeen men 
were knocked into the ^vater and drowned before 
they could be rescued. 

"THE SOLITARY INHABITANTS OF AN 

OCEAN-COVERED PLANET." 
For two days now, however, we have seen no 
signs of life apart from our own boat: not a fish- 



14 

ing smack nor steamer nor any living thing ex- 
cept one or two seabirds. So far as ocular 
evidence goes, we might be the sole and solitary 
inhabitants of an ocean-covered planet. 

And yet you would not think of this unless 
you did so deliberately: the steamer carries such 
a little world in itself that it seems self-sufficient; 
and somehow, too, the ocean in its every phase 
seems to breed a spirit of complacency and satis- 
faction such as the dry land nowhere knows. 
"They that go down to the sea in ships, that do 
business in great waters" — do they not seem to 
have in all cases a certain calm confidence and re- 
pose such as it would seem more natural to asso- 
ciate with the immovable majesty of the hills and 
the mountains? 

On the ocean, too, time goes by with noiseless 
tread. We have now been on board five days' 
and nights and have done nothing more exciting 
than eat and sleep (eating, with its three full and 
regular meals a day, and two or three other half- 
way meals in the shape of tea, broth, cakes, sand- 
wiches, etc., thrown in for good measure, is our 
principal occupation), except to play an occasion- 
al game of quoits and shuffleboard, walk the deck 
in the cool October breeze, or joke and prank with 
fellow:-passengers. Still the time has passed all 
too quickly. Barring the time when sea-sickness 



15 

holds you in thraldom, you would like a voyage 
of a month instead of a week; and not many of 
our passengers have been seriously sea-sick. 

THE ATLANTIC AND THE PACIFIC CON- 
TRASTED. 

Such is "life on the ocean wave" as we have 
found it thus far: our previous experiences having 
been limited to occasional trips between Norfolk 
and New York, between Norfolk and Boston, and 
one brief trip on the Pacific between Los Angeles, 
Cal., and the ineffably beautiful and romantic 
Catalina Islands: a place where one's castles in 
Spain seem to shape themselves into reality and 
where Tennyson's lotus-eaters might well dream 
their lives away. Somehow the Atlantic, blus- 
tery, practical, commercial, seems to partake of 
the nature of the busy English, American and 
German peoples found on its borders, while the 
peaceful Pacific, with a thousand sleepy and 
easeful islands dotting its sunny bosom, seems 
indeed to typify the spirit of the Orient with its 
dreamy religions and its slower and more easy- 
going nations. 

Thus far on this trip we havQ not had a real 
storm such as the Atlantic in its more restless 
moods is capable of bringing to pass, but we have 
had about the usual quota of rough weather: high 
waves last night and this morning that showed 



16 

us indeod how it feels to be "rocked in the cradle 
of the deep," while at other times the sea has 
been as smooth as a mill-pond. 

A PRAYER FOR "OUR GRACIOUS SOVEREIGN, 
KING EDWARD." 
There are yet two more days before I can mail 
these notes; and before that time there will prob- 
ably be others that I shall wish to add — some, 
for example, about my fellow-passengers, repre- 
senting all parts of the United States and the ut- 
termost parts of the earth: as far at least as 
Lucknow, India. A number of Scotch people are 
on board, and my first definite and clear-cut im- 
pression of having really left my home country 
came last Sunday when, in the Church of England 
service in the music-room, prayer was made not 
only for the President of the United States, but 
also for "our gracious sovereign King Edward, 
Her Majesty Queen Alexandra," and for the 
Prince of Wales and the nobility of Great Britain. 



III. 

England and Scotland: A Fair Land 
Let Down Out of Heaven. 

Liverpool, England, 
I had intended writing more of my ocean trip, 
but that is ancient history now, and too many 
other beautiful and wonderful things have 
crowded upon my sight for me even to revive 
memories of that rarely beautiful night when the 
silvery crescent of the new moon in the clear 
sky above them glorified and seemingly enchanted 
the long and fancifully shaped cloud lines ranged 
above the ocean's far horizon. Old castles seem- 
ed to be there with marvelous towers and battle- 
ments; mountain peaks, and cathedral spires, too, 
while the beauty of the northern lights added a 
singular glory to the outlying edge of the great 
cloud masses. But this was seeing in imagination 
only what I have since seen in reality, some im- 
pressions of which it is now my purpose to record. 

THE SPIRIT OP THE WRITER'S LETTERS. 

And in the very beginning of these letters, let 

me ask the reader's pardon if what I write shall 

seem somewhat disjointed and unsymmetrical. A 

traveler here sees so much, and in a hurried trip 



18 

like mine has scenery and history and art and 
circumstance thrust upon him in such confusing 
variety that it is extremely difficult to bring or- 
der out of chaos, especially when writing must be 
done at odd moments and under untoward sur- 
roundings. Will my readers pardon me, there- 
fore, if I attempt nothing more ambitious than a 
series of gossipy friendship letters about the 
things I see that interest me and that I think will 
interest them? And with this understanding I am 
ready to set out with my impressions of the Old 
World. 

"LAND OP BROWN HEATH AND SHAGGY 
WOOD." 

Scotla,nd, I shall not forget, was the first Euro- 
pean country to greet my eye ; nor can I believe 
that I shall find one of which I shall carry away 
a finer impression. It is no wonder that the 
Scotchman loves his country: no wonder that it 
was from Scotland that the lines came — 

Breathes there a man with soul so dead 
Who never to himself hath said, 
This is my own, my native land? 

With its beautiful mountains, lakes, meadows, 

and rocky shore line, it makes in its natural 

scenery alone an irresistible appeal to our fancy 

and to our admiration; but far more effective is 

its claim upon our love and our interest when we 



19 

look back upon the panorama of its thousand 
mighty years of history until now every tongue 
and land has been enriched by stories of Scot- 
ish romance and Scottish adventure. 

I can hardly do better perhaps than to outline 
briefly the course of my travels up to this hour 
and then follow it up later with such comment 
as I may wish to make. On Sunday then, let me 
say, we landed in Glasgow; Monday we went to 
Ayr, the home of Robert Burns; Tuesday we 
went through the Trossachs country made famous 
in the novels of Sir Walter Scott, traveling partly 
by coach, and partly by rail, ending the day with 
a visit to Stirling Castle; Wednesday we spent in 
Edinburgh; Thursday we visited Melrose Abbey, 
Abbottsford (the home of Sir Walter Scott), and 
went thence by rail to Wordsworth's lake coun- 
try, a memorable seventeen-mile coaching trip 
form Keswick to Ambleside bringing us in late 
afternoon to our boat on Windermere; by its wa- 
ters we spent last night, and this late Friday 
evening finds me writing this letter from Liver- 
pool, England. 

THE BEAUTY OF RURAL SCOTLAND. 

The very first and the most vivid impression 

made upon the traveler here, I believe, is that of 

the beauty of the country, the rural districts. 

Towns here look much like those in America — a 



20 

little older, streets a little more crooked, more 
old buildings rich in historic associations. But 
between the country here and the country in 
America the difference is much more marked. I 
remember how Mr. C. S. Wooten said to me last 
winter, speaking of his trip abroad last summer: 
"England looks like a country just let down from 
Paradise. I didn't see a weed nor a gully nor a 
poor horse, sheep or cow in the whole country." 
And I am now prepared to vouch for his state- 
ment. True, I have seen a few weeds and one or 
two gullies, but in all my travel in Scotland and 
England thus far I have not seen more weeds or 
gullies than I have sometimes seen in a single 
ten-acre lot in America. 

SCOTLAND VS. VIRGINIA. 

A Virginia girl who stood beside me as the 
stone-fenced farm plats on the Scottish coast came 
into view, exclaimed at the beauty of the scene. 

"Oh," I replied, "Virginia will look that way a 
hundred or two years from now when population 
becomes dense and farming good." 

But her reply is worth recording and worthy of 
serious thought: 

"The trouble is that we are wearing out the 
land and letting it wash away long before ever 
the dense population comes." 



21 

A GLIMPSE OP ENGLISH FARMING. 

Here in England it is very different. Every 
foot of land seems to have attention, intelligent 
attention, the fields being as carefully tended as 
our gardens, while the Scotch and English gar- 
dens themselves are models of beauty and excel- 
lence such as Americans do not even dream of. 
The fences enclosing the farms are nearly all of 
stone, or else hedges; stone walls line every road; 
railway tracks are bordered with shrubbery; the 
public highways are all of macadam and kept in 
constant repair; while the meanest houses are so 
neat and so beautified by lawn, hedge, shrub and 
flower that you can hardly think of the inmates 
as being poor at all. A frame house is almost 
never seen. The stone fences cross hill, meadow, 
and even climb the mountain-sides, and add a 
touch of picturesqueness to the landscape which 
nothing else could quite replace. Every home, 
too, has a wealth of beautiful flowers, and vege- 
tables are cultivated much more extensively and 
in much greater variety than with us. 

If I could choose but one of England's points 
of superiority as a gift for my own country, how- 
ever, I believe I should take her good roads. 
With such beautiful highways, innumerable oth- 
er good things would be added to us. No one 
could ever think of putting up a ramshackle cabin 
2 



22 

alongside such roads, and in a thousand ways 
they would stimulate and hasten the development 
of our people and of our resources. 

AMONG THE HAUNTS OF ROBBIE BURNS. 

I shall never forget how through the fog the 
rocky coast of Scotland gradually came into view 
last Sunday morning, and how I thought, "For 
the first time in my life I gaze upon land which 
white men knew five hundred years ago!" Nor 
can I ever forget my first set trip into Scottish 
territory, this being ray visit to Ayr, the birth- 
place of the poet Burns, on Monday last. Leav- 
ing out of consideration its usual Scotch neat- 
ness and cleanliness, I doubt whether any reader 
of mine now lives in a humbler home than that in 
which the immortal Scotch poet first saw the 
light of day. A low roofed stone house thatched 
with straw, you enter one room and pass into the 
next, finding it divided into stalls for the cattle 
and sheep; then the two adjoining rooms — on 
the same ground floor — were those of the Burns 
family. 

" 'Tis but a cot roofed in with straw, 

A hovel made of clay. 
One door shuts out the sun and storm, 

One window greets the day; 
And yet I stand within this room, 

And hold all thrones in scorn. 
For here beneath this lowly thatch 

Love's sweetest bard was born." 



23 

We rambled by "the banks and braes of bon- 
nie Doon," we crossed the "auld brig," and we 
followed the line of Tarn O'Shanter's famous 
ride, looking into the broken walls of Alloway 
Kirk where he saw the ghostly dance. The "auld 
Kirk" dates back to the year 1145, and the bell 
which, still unbroken, surmounts its crumbling 
walls has stood the storms of nearly four hundred 
winters. 

ENVIRONMENT AND SPIRIT OF SCOTT, 
BURNS, AND WORDSWORTH. 

It may not be unwise just at this point to an- 
ticipate my narrative just a little and comment 
on the homes of two other poets — Scott and 
Wordsworth — which I have seen since visiting 
Ayr. Scott's beautiful and even lordly home at 
Abbottsford, overlooking the Tweed, is a treas- 
ure house of Scottish historical relics: coats-of- 
arms, swords, suits of armor, blunderbusses, etc., 
etc. About Wordsworth's country I shall always 
remember most vividly how the clouds wrapped 
its low mountain peaks in mist, and how more 
nearly than anywhere else I have observed (except 
in our very highest American mountains) heaven 
and earth seemed there to meet. 

Having seen the rustic and lowly home of 
Burns, I shall always better understand how the 
inspired Scottish ploughman sang songs with the 



24 

smell of the soil about them; having seen Scott's 
home and its numberless illustrations of his tire- 
less energy in collecting Scotch historical relics, 
I shall always think of it in connection with his 
great works of fiction; while I must think that 
a man born in Wordsv/orth's country as I have 
seen it is predestined to be an intense lover of 
nature. I am especially glad that at sunset last 
night I saw the ever low-lying clouds envelop the 
summit of one of the mountains on which Words- 
worth loved to gaze; and after such a scene I 
shall always find greater pleasure in his lines: 

"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: 

The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star, 

Hath had elsewhere its setting, 

And cometh from afar: 
Not in entire forgetfulness, 
And not in utter nakedness. 
But trailing clouds of glory do we come 
From God, who is our home." 

It is easy about Windermere to "look up 
through Nature to Nature's God," and the "trail- 
ing clouds of glory" never seem to be very far 
away. 



IV. 

England's Cities, People, and Postal 
System. 

Chester^ England. 

I wrote last in Liverpool, and before going 
further it may be well to say a word about that 
famous English city. It is of most interest to 
Southerners because of its relation to our cotton 
industry, and it was fitting therefore that of all 
places in it we should first visit the Cotton Ex- 
change. 

We found it upon the occasion of our visit 
somewhat less tumultuous than we have found 
the New York Cotton Exchange when we have 
visited it, but at times the English bidding grev/ 
quite exciting. January and February futures 
were selling at fractions above "five pence" (ten 
cents) when we were in Liverpool, and cables 
from New York evidently had an important bear- 
ing upon prices offered. 

A VIVID IMPRESSION OP DIFFERENCES IN 

TIME. 

It is of interest to record, by the way, that 

though we were at the Liverpool Exchange well 

in the afternoon, it was at that time so early in 



26 

the day in New York that New York cables were 
just beginning to come in, while it was still later 
in the afternoon that cablegrams from New Or- 
leans, still further west, began to make their ap- 
pearance. One section of the Liverpool Ex- 
change is devoted to trading in Egyptian cotton, 
cablegrams from Alexandria, Egypt, keeping 
English buyers informed as to the course of 
prices in the African market. Of course, this in- 
terest here, however, is only a side line, as it 
v>^ere, to the dominant interest in the American 
staple, and even a rumor of "hot winds in Texas," 
such as was exciting the Liverpool Exchange on 
the day of our visit, has its effect on the market. 

COTTON "THE MOST BARBAROUSLY HAN- 
DLED COMMERCIAL PRODUCT IN THE 
WORLD." 

We were also interested in seeing the condition 
in which American cotton arrives in Liverpool, 
and no one who once sees the plight in which the 
great Southern farm product reaches the English 
spinner can fail to agree with Edward Atkinson 
in pronouncing cotton "the most barbarously 
handled commercial product in the world." Not 
only do the bales look ragged, dirty, beggar-like, 
and generally disreputable, but the actual loss 
and waste in handling is nothing less than enor- 
mous and a serious reflection upon the sound 



27 

sense and business ability of Southern planters. 
A glance at a wagon load of American cotton be- 
ing hauled down an English street is enough to 
make any Southerner an advocate of better baling 
methods. Cotton from India and Egypt arrives 
in immeasurably better condition, and I am told 
that, other things being equal, manufacturers here 
prefer the foreign cotton for this reason. 

LIVERPOOL AND THE SLAVE TRADE. 
Liverpool is also of peculiar interest to South- 
erners because it was long a center of the slave- 
trading industry. England did not finally pro- 
hibit the slave trade until 1807 (America in 1789 
had fixed the year 1808 as the time when the 
nefarious traffic should end with us), and even in 
1807 the Liverpool merchants protested hardly 
less vigorously than they had done a generation 
before against this interference with their "com- 
mercial rights." It v/as England, as John Rich- 
ard Green points out, that introduced slavery in- 
to the West Indies and America — a Pandora's 
box of unnumbered evils from which even Hope 
itself seems to have been excluded. Let it also 
be mentioned in this connection that when Eng- 
land came to the abolition of slavery in her West 
India colonies in the 30's, she paid the owners 
for their loss. Would God that North and South 
in America had been wise enough (as Lincoln 



.wished) to settle their slavery trouble in the 
same way! 

HOW INTERNAL IMPROVEMENTS SAVED 
GLASGOW. 

Somewhat larger than Liverpool is Glasgow, 
Scotland, where we first landed, but of which I 
have said but little until now. Glasgow is a fine 
illustration of the fact that the prosperity of a 
town depends not so much upon its natural re- 
sources as upon the progressiveness of its people. 
Fifty years ago the Clyde River at Glasgow was 
only 180 feet wide and three feet deep. By 
spending $35,000,000 in deepening and broaden- 
ing it (it is now 500 feet wide), Glasgow has put 
itself in the forefront of European seaports and 
has made itself the greatest British city except 
London. 

Our Southern folk would do well to take the 
example of Glasgow to heart and redouble their 
energies in behalf of all well-conceived plans for 
inland waterways and other internal improve- 
ments. 

COMMON NAMES MORE FAMILIAR THAN IN 
NEW YORK OR BOSTON. 

There is one thing about these Scotch and 
English towns that cannot fail to impress itself 
upon any thoughtful visitor, and that is the sim- 



29 

ilarity of the surnames to those common through- 
out our Southern country. It is the most strik- 
ing illustration I have yet found of the oft-repeat- 
ed statement that the South is now the most thor- 
oughly Anglo-Saxon part of America. Walk down 
any business street in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Liver- 
pool, Chester, or any other English or Scotch 
town that I have seen, and on the signs you will 
see in most cases names so common in your own 
town or county that you can hardly believe 
yourself in a foreign country, while the surnames 
you would find displayed in a business street in 
Boston or New York are strangely foreign and 
unfamiliar to a Southern traveler. I venture the 
prediction that any Southerner can walk down 
the main streets of Glasgow or Liverpool and find 
five times as many familiar names as he would 
find in a similar area on Broadway, New York. 

And it's a good stock of folk with which to 
claim kin — these English and Scotch, It's very 
foolish and very harmful for jingoes to try to stir 
up bad feeling between England and America. 
We belong to the same great family, our ideals 
are mainly the same, and the two nations should 
work together in furthering those ideals through- 
out the v/ide world. 



30 

ENGLISH ROYALTY A LIFELESS, MAKE-BE- 
LIEVE FORMALISM. 

Too many of our people are given to saying 
that England is a Kingdom and the United States 
a Republic: therefore to praise England's system 
of government is political heresy. The truth is, 
that the English system is, in many respects, 
hiore democratic than the American, royalty here 
being nothing more nor less than an emasculated 
and perfectly harmless piece of "make-believe" 
formalism which the people amusing themselves 
have chosen to perpetuate, since it does no harm 
and costs no great deal to maintain.. Not only 
is it true that the "King's speech" which comes 
nominally from him at the opening of each Par- 
liament, is written for him by the popular min- 
istry and the King himself cannot change a word 
in it, but the people even show a disposition to 
have their own way about the social affairs of 
royalty — the only remaining phase of English life 
in which the King is really King at all. 

It was only last week that an incident happened 
vividly illustrating this fact. The Labor and 
Socialist Party has been gaining strength rapidly 
here in recent years, and now has thirty members 
in Parliament. Well, one of these thirty had at- 
tacked King Edward so bitterly that when the 
King gave a reception to the House of Commons/ 



31 

a few days ago this Socialist member was not 
invited — and the upshot is that the English press 
and people criticise the King so vigorously that 
the incident is not likely to be repeated. My 
recollection is, that President Roosevelt of our 
country some time ago refused to invite Senator 
Tillman to a similar function without exciiing 
half so much ado. 

NEARLY AS MANY VOTERS AS IN AMERICA. 

There are also practically as many voters in 
proportion to population here in England as in 
America: here one inhabitant in every six is a 
voter and in America one in every five. More 
than this, England has the Australian ballot sys- 
tem, as every American State should have, both 
in primary and in regular elections (with special 
provision for illiterates) ; and bribery in elec- 
tions, direct or indirect, is checked by well-con- 
ceived legislation. 

America might also well take lessons from 
England in the matter of civil service reform and 
municipal government. Public ownership of 
street railways, water-works, etc., is common in 
the cities, and while I do not know about water 
rates, I do know that street-car fares are only 
about half as much as in America. 



32 

EFFICIENCY OF THE ENGLISH- POSTOFFICE. 
Especially useful to the English people is the 
postoffice, which has here reached a degree of 
efficiency in public service in comparison with 
which our American postoffice system shows to 
decidedly poor advantage. But as we came abroad 
ten years ago (at Tom Watson's suggestion) and 
grafted the European idea of rural mail delivery 
upon our postoffice system, perhaps we shall 
sometime force Congress into giving us the par- 
cels post and postal savings bank also. Going 
down the street in Windermere Friday morning, 
I was struck by the sign: 



Postoffice for Money-Orders, Savings Bank, 
Parcels Post, Telegrams, Insurance, Annuity, 
Internal and Revenne Stamps. 



Nor does this sign exaggerate the business done 
by any common English postoffice. The Govern- 
ment owns the telegraph here and the rate is one 
cent a word, with a minimum charge of twelve 
cents, the telegraph offices being run in connec- 
tion with the postoffices. On press telegrams the 
rate is only one-fourth cent a word; and provision 
is made that rural mail carriers shall handle all 
prepaid telegrams left in mail-boxes. Over the 
telephone business the Government also exercises 



supervision and "constructs private telegraph and 
telephone lines on rental terms," as the official 
announcement explains. 

HOW THE PARCELS POST WORKS IN ENG- 
LAND. 

The parcels post and the postal savings bank 
especially interest me, as I believe we should 
lose no time in adopting these invaluable im- 
provements in America. Any package not over 
eleven pounds in weight, or three feet six inches 
in length, may be taken to a postoffice here and 
sent by parcels post to any part of Great Britain 
upon these charges: 

One pound or less, 6 cents. 
Between 1 and 2 pounds, 8 cents. 
Between 2 and 3 pounds, 10 cents. 
Between 5 and 7 pounds, 14 cents. 
Between 7 and 8 pounds, 16 cents. 
Between 8 and 9 pounds, 18 cents. 
Between 9 and 10 pounds, 20 cents. 
Between 10 and 11 pounds, 22 cents. 

An examination of the official rates would in- 
dictate, too, that not only may parcels be sent 
within Great Britain at these rates, but packages 
may be sent from here to almost any part of the 
habitable world as cheaply as they may be sent 
from one county-seat to the next in America. And 
yet an American Congress, session after session. 



34 

has refused to heed the growing popular demand 
for the parcels post service. 

John Wanamaker, when Postmaster-General, 
wisely declared that the two greatest reasons why 
we have no parcels post are (1) the Adams Ex- 
press Company, and, (2) the American Express 
Company. Sometime, however, the people are 
going to bring such pressure to bear upon our 
Solons at Washington that these giant corpora- 
tions will no longer be allowed to stand in the 
way of the needs of the people in this matter, 
and our farmers, by vigorous action, may 'do 
much to speed the day. 

THE POSTAL SAVINGS BANK ALSO A SUC- 
CESS. 
Of no less value is the Postal Savings Bank and 
its allied features. Anybody (even children over 
seven years of age) can go to any postoffice here 
and open up a savings account, depositing twenty- 
five cents or more at the time, 2i per cent inter- 
est a year being allowed on all deposits, and the 
Government of Great Britain guaranteeing the 
safety of the funds. Deposits may be made or 
withdrawn at any postoffice, no matter where you 
are, if you have your deposit book with you. No 
one may deposit more than $1,000 in this way, 
but after the $1,000 mark is passed, the de- 



35 

positor may invest in interest-bearing Govern- 
ment stock. 

GOVERNMENT INSURANCE. 
At each postofflce, too, the Government calls at- 
tention to its life insurance provisions, which are 
virtually a feature of the postal savings bank de- 
partment. You may take out insurance that will 
(1) pay you so much a year until death, or (2) 
after ten years, or (3) after twenty years from 
beginning, or (4) at the ages of 55, 60, or 65, or 
(5) at death. 



V. 
Glimpses of English Life and Customs. 

London, England. 

My last letter, I believe, ended with, some com- 
ment upon the Government of England. One thing 
that interests foreigners in tkis connection is how 
the Government maintains itself in a free trade 
country without imposing excessive property taxes. 

Be it remembered, then, that England is not 
without tariff taxes, but there are few of these 
and nearly all these few are levied on luxuries or 
semi-luxuries. Remembering how notable a part 
the tea tax played in our early Revolutionary his- 
tory in America, it is of interest to see that with- 
in her own borders England has maintained this 
heavy tariff until now the Government collects 
$40,000,000 to $50,000,000 a year from this 
source alone, and nearly $75,000,000 a year from 
the tariff on tobacco, and snuff. The excise or 
whiskey taxes bring in $150,000,000 a year more, 
and there are also special income and inheritance 
taxes, and taxes upon the gross earnings of rail- 
ways, except where the rate is less than two cents 
a mile. 

THE INHERITANCE TAX. 

The inheritance tax, it will be recalled, is one 
which President Roosevelt has recently commend- 



37 

ed to tlie attention of Americans. Over here an 
estate exceeding $500 in value pays a government 
tax of 1 per cent; $2,500, 2 per cent; $5,000, 3 
per cent; $50,000, 4 per cent; and so on up to 
$500,000, which pays 6 per cent, and $5,000,000, 
which pays 8 per cent. There are also special 
graduated taxes in case property goes to persons 
not near of kin, amounting to 10 per cent where 
the property goes to persons very far removed in 
kinship, or not of blood relationship at all. There 
are also special stamp taxes of many kinds, and 
special Boer War taxes now (similar to our Span- 
ish-American War taxes) which require stamps on 
checks and upon all receipted bills. 

There is a considerable party here which favors 
the establishment of a protective tariff, this senti- 
ment gaining strength, in part, from the unfair 
methods of American monopolies competing for 
British trade. Socialism has also been making 
marked growth among the working classes for a 
number of years past. 

WOMAN SUFFRAGE A LIVE ISSUE. 
Just at this writing, however, the livest politi- 
cal issue is woman suffrage. For a long time the 
women of England who are tax-payers have had 
the privilege of voting for city and county of- 
ficers, and they are now fighting earnestly for the 



38 

privilege of voting for members of Parliament — 
as if to say, for members of the British Con- 
gress, as well as for local and State officers. In 
a number of cases the woman suffrage advocates 
have grov/n so riotous in their meetings as to 
make it necessary for the police to interfere. 
When indicted, however, the women agitators re- 
fuse to pay the fines imposed, going to jail in- 
stead — and then they make a great ado about be- 
ing "martyrs" to the cause of equal suffrage. 

If the woman suffrage idea prevail, the priv- 
ilege of voting will be given, of course, only to 
women who are tax-payers ("rate-payers" they 
are called here) or householders (that is, widows 
or others who are heads of houses). 

A TEMPERANCE DEMONSTRATION IN HYDE 
PARK. 

Another very live subject is the temperance 
question. All parts of Great Britain, and especial- 
ly Scotland, are rum-cursed. The most powerful 
temperance argument I have ever witnessed was 
in Chester depot the other day when an old gray- 
haired woman was attacked both by her husband 
and her own half-drunken son. The officers in- 
terfered and drove off the men, while the weeping 
woman sobbed piteously in broken Lancashire 
dialect: "They makes six pounds [$30j a week, 



39 

but never a farthing [half-cent] do they give me: 
it all goes for drink, drink." 

Whiskey, as I have intimated, is especially the 
bane of Scotland, and many fear that it is almost 
hopelessly sapping the strength of one of the 
finest races of people in the world. But the Scot- 
tish Temperance League and other organizations 
are making a brave fight against the evil, and 
here in London yesterday I saw a temperance pro- 
cession "terrible as an army with banners," a 
mile and a half long, marching into Hyde Park 
where the immense audience (made up chiefly of 
working people) was addressed from eight differ- 
ent stands by a great variety of speakers. For 
nearly two hours the thousands of spectators lis- 
tened and cheered and laughed, ending by adopt- 
ing vigorous resolutions in behalf of the "Licens- 
ing Bill" which Parliament is now beginning to 
consider. 

WHAT THE LICENSING BILL PROVIDES. 

In explanation of this Licensing Bill a word or 
two should be said. In England saloons are call- 
ed "public houses," and their managers "publi- 
cans." Well, many years ago licenses to conduct 
"public houses" were granted rather promiscuous- 
ly, and it has been the custom of the authorities 
to renew these licenses from year to year without 
further inquiry. Now, however, it is proposed to 



40 

limit the number of saloons, and the provisions of 
the Licensing Bill would, I believe, decrease the 
number in London by half — and half means many- 
thousand. 

The Licensing Bill also looks (1) to the adop- 
tion of local option; (2) to prohibiting the sale 
of liquor to children; (3) to the ultimate prohib- 
iting of women as bar-maids. There are now 
nearly 30,000 women employed as bar-tenders in 
England, and the most serious phase of the liquor 
problem is the growth of intemperance among wo- 
men, especially among working girls. Drinking is 
said to be stationary (or possibly actually de>- 
creasing) among the masses of English men, but 
increasing among English women and among the 
wealthy and leisure class of both sexes. A friend 
of mine spoke to me of seeing a great number of 
apparently respectable women drinking in the sa- 
loons in Chester a few nights ago, and in Glasgow 
women are often seen reeling from saloon doors. 

A CABMAN'S ARGUMENT. 
It is high time that England were doing some- 
thing to save herself, and the great temperance 
procession in Hyde Park yesterday was one of the 
most encouraging things I have seen over here. 
T was also gratified to find the recent record of 
the United States held up as an example and in- 
centive for English action. In all cases the argu- 



41 

ments for and against the Licensing Bill are strik- 
ingly like the arguments for and against State 
Prohibition in our Southern States with which sve 
are all so familiar. There is the same specious 
appeal to "the poor man," arguing that the bill 
will leave it easj^ for the rich to get liquor but 
make it hard for the poor man; and the same cry 
of "confiscation" because the Government would 
refuse to continue some licenses. But a big bod- 
ied, keen-witted Irish cabman whom I heard ad- 
dress the Hyde Park meeting yesterday answered 
both these arguments, and made an especial ap- 
peal to working men and women, his hearers, in 
the declaration that when you buy a farm product 
3 per cent of the purchase money goes for labor ; 
clothing 25 per cent; iron and steel goods, 23 per 
cent; coal, 55 per cent; while of each one hundred 
pounds (or dollars) worth of whiskey bought, 
only 7 per cent goes to labor. 

To-day the House of Commons takes up the Li- 
censing Bill and thirty 'days will be devoted to its 
discussion. The whiskey interests will make a 
desperate and conscienceless struggle, and already 
there is growing evidence of the truth of Lord 
Rosebury's declaration that "if the State does not 
soon control the whiskey traffic, the whiskey traf- 
fic will control the State." And England is going 
to control the traffic. 



42 

THE QUESTION OF OLD AGE PENSIONS. 

Other notable political measures now up for 
discussion and action in England are the Educa- 
tion Act and the Old Age Pension measure. The 
bill for old age pensions has already passed the 
House of Commons, and it is not believed that the 
House of Lords will dare turn it down. The bill 
in its present shape provides that the Government 
shall pay to all persons over sixty years of age 
the sum of five shillings ($1.20) a week, unless 
such persons have an income of over ten shillings 
($2,40) a week from other sources. In such cases 
the Government pension will be only enough to 
make a total of fifteen shillings, or $3. 60. The 
Education Act now under consideration is for the 
purpose of relieving the present discontent among 
non-Episcopalians who are protesting from one 
end of England to the other against the control 
of many of the public schools by the Episcopal 
clergy. 

WHAT EDUCATION HAS DONE FOR GREAT 
BRITAIN. 
And while speaking of schools, let me mention 
education as the great source of English and 
Scotch greatness. It has long been a saying that 
"education has made Scotland," and the support 
that Scotch Presbyterians have given the cause of 



43 

education in America is a matter in which, they 
justly take pride. 

Even the cabmen here read the newspapers 
almost as carefully as business men in America 
would do. And I have been impressed by the 
number of monuments which record the dead 
man's services to public education as his strong- 
est claim upon the regard of posterity. Over in 
the old town of Stirling in Scotland I recall how: 
a tablet in Greyfriars Church records the fact 
that "Alexander Cuningham, merchant in Stirl- 
ling, to extend the inestimable blessings of edu- 
cation, bequeathed A. D. 1809, £4,000 ($20,000) 
to be expended in maintaining, clothing, and edu- 
cating poor boys" there, while another memorial 
alongside is "to the memory of John Allen, writer 
in Stirling, mortgaging A. D. 1735 the sum of 
30,000 marks by which hundreds of young men 
have been able to advance themselves and to fill 
situations in life which their lot seemed to for- 
bid." In Liverpool, too, you find the same idea 
in the striking monuments to James Nugent, bear- 
ing the legend, "Save the boy," while the signifi- 
cant inscription on the monument to Major Lester 
reads: "Give the child a fair chance." Demo- 
cratic England to-day understands full well that — 
"Princes and lords may flourish or may fade: 

A breath can make them, as a breath has made; 

But a bold peasantry, their country's pride. 

When once destroyed, can never be supplied." 



44 

AN INSIDIOUS LOWERING OF OUR STAND- 
ARDS OF LIVING. 

An intelligent laboring class is the backbone of 
any country, and in this England is strong. There 
are no negroes here, of course, the entire serving 
class being white. And their neatness, cleanliness, 
quickness, and intelligence are some of the things 
which impress themselves most deeply upon the 
Southern traveler. Nowhere in the country dis- 
tricts here have I seen the signs of shiftlessness 
■ — broken gates, gullied fields, neglected tools, 
shackly out-houses, unpainted and ill-kept resi- 
dences — which mar the landscape in so many 
country districts in the South. A house here may 
have only two or three rooms, but its neatness 
makes it a joy forever, and the fields look like 
the work of landscape gardeners: all Scotland be- 
tween Edinburgh and Glasgow seems to be al- 
most as neat as our Capitol Squares — and Eng- 
land is hardly less beautiful. 

I bear no ill-will toward our negroes, but it is 
impossible to escape the conclusion that their ig- 
norance and shiftlessness have not only held back 
the South in a thousand ways, but their careless- 
ness has provided a lower level for indifferent, 
white people to fall to. Nowhere else do you find 
white people content to live in such ugly homes 
and with such unpromising farms as often meet 



45 

our vision in the South, and I think it partially- 
explained by the fact that the negro, taken fresh 
from Africa, has lowered our ideals and standards 
of living in a certain insidious fashion from which 
these European countries have fortunately been 
exempt. 

"EVERYBODY WORKS — INCLUDING 
FATHER." 

Another way in which the difference between 
intelligent white labor and shiftless negro labor 
makes itself felt is in the different attitude to- 
ward work itself. People here in England do not 
seem to regard any work that comes to hand as 
being "beneath them." Over in Leamington the 
other day the man who joined his wife in waiting 
on our table, and who brought the water to my 
room, was a man of such intelligence that I should 
guess him to be a minister; a man with the bear- 
ing of a gentleman and a man whose wide knowl- 
edge of politics and history made it a pleasure to 
talk with him. It was much the same way in 
Glasgow, so that at sight of the head men of the 
house removing plates from the table, one of our 
party well remarked: "In England everybody 
works — including father." 

Most of the smaller hotels seem to be run by 
women, women work largely in the fields, and in 



46 

the stores women, I believe, are even more nu- 
merous than in America. The women are less 
beautiful than in the South, but have fine, rosy 
complexions and healthy bodies. The young girls 
seem to be slower in "coming out," wear child- 
ish clothes at a later age, and I have seen a num- 
ber of girls eighteen or twenty years old wearing 
their hair in plaits. One hideous custom among 
English women of the more careless sort is that 
of cigarette smoking. Among men generally, on 
the other hand, I should say that there is not one- 
third so much smoking as among American men. 
The "soft drink" habit is not found here at all, 
and I haven't seen a drug-store soda-water foun- 
tain since I left America. 

THE NEGLECTED H'S. 
Concerning the speech of the people, we all 
know, of course, of the Englishman's predilection 
for dropping his H's. "It was 'ot, so 'ot," said a 
fellow-traveler speaking to me yesterday of the 
weather two weeks ago (though I haven't gone a 
day without my overcoat since I left America), 
and your common Englishman says "'ouse," not 
house, and " 'orse," not horse. Another curious 
pronunciation is sounding "y" for "a," as "lydy" 
instead of "lady." "The gyte is right stryte be- 
fore you," said a man to me Friday, meaning 



47 

"gate" and "straight." But the people are all 
wonderfully polite. "Thank you," is always on 
the tip of the tongue, and I confess to a liking for 
the English habit of saying frankly, "I'm sorry," 
where an American would say, "Beg pardon." 

There is a certain dignity about even the signs 
in public places. Thus you do not see at Oxford, 
"Keep Off the Grass," but "Please Not to Walk 
on the Grass." In a printed hotel notice at Lake- 
side, I read that "The proprietor respectfully in- 
timates that" so and so may be done. 

Another matter of interest to me has been the 
Scripture motto verses one so often finds in his 
bedroom, and the taste with which rooms are de- 
corated, especially notable being the excellent 
taste shown in the selection of pictures. 

On the old tombstones, moreover, a curious 
custom is that of giving the occupation of the de- 
ceased person. Thus in Glasgow you read of 
merchants, sail-makers, teachers, etc. In the 
church-yard of Melrose Abbey there are epitaphs 
of "tenants" and "gardeners," while an inscrip- 
tion I copied at Ayr alongside that of Robert 
Burns's father reads as follows: 

"William Croslie, Sr., Fanner, 

Died at Brockloch, 2 August, 

1882, Aged 91; and 

Marian Comochan, His Spouse, 

Died 5, May 1870, Aet., 70." 



WHY RAILWAY ACCIDENTS ARE FEWER. 

And while I am giving this running sketch of 
miscellaneous matters, I must not fail to say a 
:word about the English railways which are in 
many respects radically different from those in 
America. For one thing the cars are not open 
lengthwise, but on the side, and all the people in 
a car do not ride together, but in compartments 
or divisions, each of which seats six or. eight per- 
sons. There are first, second, and third-class rates, 
third-class rates being, I believe, less than two 
cents a mile, and accommodations better than 
on first-class cars in the Southern States. The 
trains are practically never behind time. 

But of all differences in favor of the English 
system that which most impresses me is the fact 
that no railroad here can run its track on a level 
across a public road. Usually the road is built 
up on either side, a bridge built, and the rail- 
road track runs underneath. This is one reason, 
no doubt, why accidents are so much rarer on 
English than on American roads. 

To the famous towns, castles, battlefields and 
other historic spots I have visited in Scotland and 
England a separate and special article must be 
devoted, and these will be considered in our next 
letter. 



VI. 

Among Castled Walls and Palaces 
Old In Story. 

London^ England. 

In my last letter I promised to give this time 
some impressions of the historic and notable 
places I have visited in Scotland and England. 

This, therefore, I now set out to do, beginning 
at Stirling (thirty-six miles from Edinburgh). For 
it was as I went over the ancient moat-bridge into 
the gigantic gates of Stirling Castle, and thought 
of its more than thousand years of checkered and 
stirring memories, that I first felt the subtle at- 
mosphere of the Middle Ages and the mystic spell 
of the long-gone days of knighthood and of chiv- 
alry. 

STIRLING CASTLE WITH ITS THOUSAND 
YEARS OP HISTORY. 

Here for the first time I saw a great mediaeval 
castle with its massive stone walls and frowning 
battlements and towers, standing out upon its 
lofty eminence above all the surrounding country: 
secured in the front by moat and drawbridge 
(with a trap-door at the entrance on the titanic 
outer walls), and then by two or three inner 
walls, while from the rear a rugged and pre- 



50 

cipitous stone ascent of sixty feet guards the ap- 
proach to the ancient fortress. 

And Stirling has a history worthy of its lofty 
eminence and this isolated grandeur. It looks out 
upon one of the most beautiful and upon one of 
the most historic views in all Great Britain. The 
battlefield of Bannockburn is before you here, and 
Stirling Bridge of course, and yet another battle- 
field — Cambuskenneth — in which Scots and Picts 
fought each other six hundred and fifty years be- 
fore Columbus discovered the New World. 

It is when you come upon facts like these that 
you begin to realize that the annals of America 
indeed deal only with the last half hour of human 
history. This very Stirling Castle, for example, 
was taken by Edward I. of England in 1304 — more 
than three hundred years before the first white 
man set foot upon Jamestown soil — and ten years 
later the famous Scotch chieftain, Bruce, recap- 
tured it. It was at Stirling that Lord Darnley 
courted Mary, Queen of Scots, and it was here 
that James I., v/ho was King of England when the 
first permanent English settlements were made in 
America, was christened and crowned, John Knox 
preaching the coronation sermon. 



51 

DAYS OF BLOOD AND CRIME NO LESS THAN 
OF ROMANCE AND CHIVALRY. 

Stirling Castle, too, at the very first brings you 
face to face with the tragedy as well as with the 
romance of the old, old days. Not only does the 
terrible dungeon — its opening a mere hole in the 
ground twelve feet down before you enter the 
dark grim caverns in which captive enemies or 
suspects went to the torment of a living death — 
not only, I say, does this foul dungeon cast a 
shadow upon the rosy pictures we like to paint of 
"the age of chivalry," but Stirling and almost 
every other castle in Great Britain has its story 
of crime involving one or more figures well-known 
in history. 

At Stirling they still show you the room where 
King James I. stabbed and killed the Earl of Doug- 
las five hundred and fifty years ago. 

In Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh I saw the lit- 
tle room where Rizzio, secretary to Mary, Queen 
of Scots, was murdered by Darnley and others — 
and but a few months later Bothwell, having plot- 
ted with the Queen for the murder of Darnley, 
here married her himself. 

In Edinburgh Castle near by I saw the old ban- 
queting hall where in 1440 the young Douglases 
were invited to a great dinner only to see the 



52 

black bull's head — the symbol of death — put be- 
fore them on the banquet table, after which they 
were dragged away and beheaded. Here, too, 
Oliver Cromwell and others met in 1648 and dis- 
cussed the necessity for executing Charles I., and 
Edinburgh Castle also has a connecting link with 
the murder of Macbeth in that the St. Margaret's 
Chapel here was built by the wife of the Malcolm 
of Shakespeare's play. 

Kenilworth Castle, of which only picturesque 
ruins now remain, of course calls to mind the al- 
leged murder of his wife by Earl Leicester as told 
in Scott's famous novel. 

And the Bloody Tower of London, I need not 
mention, is famous for the horrible crimes of 
which it has been the scene. At its very portals 
you pass the spot where the young princes were 
smothered by Richard III. four hundred years 
ago; and among those who languished in prison 
here before finding death from a headsman's axe 
were Anne Boleyn, wife of Henry VIII. and moth- 
er of Elizabeth; Lady Jane Grey and her husband 
(beheaded because of their claims upon the 
throne), and Sir Walter Raleigh. 

THE WORLD IS GETTING BETTER. 
With the memory of these terrible crimes fresh 
upon me — committed in most cases by Kings and 
Queens claiming to rule "by the grace of God" — 



53 

it is easy to see how far we have come from the 
time when men and women with human blood 
upon their hands could sit undisturbed upon the 
world's greatest thrones. And having also stood 
but a few days ago upon the spot in Oxford where 
Cranmer, Latimer, and Ridley were burned at the 
stake for conscience' sake (while remembering 
that God has put us of this generation upon a time 
when the whole world enjoys religious liberty), 
should I not be a blind pessimist indeed did I not 
believe that — • 

"through the ages one increasing purpose 
runs 
And the thoughts of men are widened with the 
process of the suns"? 

This is the best age that the world has ever 
known, and to-morrow will be better than to-day. 
It is a good thing to come to Europe and get that 
historical perspective v/hich makes for faith like 
this. Not only have public morals improved, but 
life itself is infinitely richer and nobler now than 
ever before. The plain Southern farmer to-day 
may live in greater comfort than the lords and 
ladies of the castle in the so-called "brave days 
of old." 

There are eddies and cross-currents in the 
stream of human history, and sometimes the "back 
waters" of reaction from the furious main torrent; 
4 



54 

but always the dominant movement is toward 
good: of this we may he sure. Here in the British 
Museum a day or two ago I looked with interest 
and with reverence upon the original copies of the 
Magna Charta, that great corner-stone of our Eng- 
lish liberties, and reflected upon the long, hard- 
fought, and yet unretreating struggle through 
which the idea of "liberty, equality, and fratern- 
ity" has since fought its way toward that "one far- 
off divine event to which the whole creation 
moves." 

THE MAJESTIC FIGURE OF OLIVER CROM- 
WELL. 

I was glad to come to England as much as any- 
thing else for the privilege of making pilgrimage 
to the shrines of some of the men whose work in 
history or literature has evoked my admiration. 

No single incident of the trip thus far, there- 
fore, has pleased me more than the special priv- 
ilege given me at Warwick Castle of putting on 
my head the helmet of Oliver Cromwell; and in 
Westminster Hall it was Cromwell's figure that 
was most in my mind: Cromwell with patience ex- 
hausted coming upon England's unprofitable ser- 
vants, who had dilly-dallied so long about weighty 
matters, and driving the miscalled Parliament 
from its halls. I can hear him now, the stern- 



55 

visaged and purposeful Puritan and man of iron, 
speaking in the language of the Bible as he did 
at Dunbar and as he does in the letter from him 
which I saw here in London the other day. De- 
fiantly he recounts the follies of the Parliament: 
resolutely at last he drives them before him. 
"Your hour is come," he proclaims, "the Lord 
hath done with you." That day Cromwell was 
master of England, "Lord Protector of the Com- 
monwealth," ruling .with the power of a Caesar 
even if without a Caesar's ambition or selfishness: 
and yet it was but a few years from this time that 
the returning monarchy had his body rudely torn 
from the grave and his head put upon the gables 
of this same Westminster Hall! 

But Cromwell's story proves afresh that the 
sure verdict of history may always be awaited 
with calm confidence — as true in the long run as 
that the polar needle, temporarily disturbed by 
some unusual attraction, will yet inevitably re- 
turn and swing true again to the unchanging 
north star. Nine years ago a great assemblage 
met here by Westminster Hall again, and a life- 
size statue of Cromwell was unveiled — the monu- 
ment having the additional distinction of being 
placed within the enclosed court of England's 
Parliament — and a mighty nation uncovered its 
head in reverence to Cromwell's memory. 



56 

Shall not sometime our own America itself, 
grown wiser, pay a like tribute in our Capitol at 
Washington to Lee and to Jackson, and to others 
of like grandeur of spirit who fought on the los- 
ing side in the other great civil struggle of an 
English-speaking nation? 

A TYPICAL LETTER FROM CARLYLE. 
Carlyle is another one of my heroes, and I was 
glad to go out to Chelsea and see the house where 
he died — just as I was glad to see a typical letter 
of his regretting his then seemingly fruitless 
search for a publisher for "Sartor Resartus" and 
referring to some man as provoking his admira- 
tion "because he is a, man, a real man, and not 
a mere clothes-horse." 

THE GRAVES OP WESLEY, WATTS, AND BUN- 
YAN. 
Sunday morning I was glad to see John Milton's 
old church; his grave is in the chancel, and this, 
by the way, is the same church in which Oliver 
Cromwell was married. We also went to the Wes- 
ley Chapel where John Wesley, the great founder 
of Methodism, preached in the later years of his 
life, assisted by his famous poet-brother, Charles 
Wesley, the author of so many familiar hymns. 
John Wesley 'died in the little house beside the 
Chapel, and his mother, Susannah Wesley (moth- 



er of seventeen or nineteen children, I have for- 
gotten which number) is buried in the Bunhill 
burying grounds just across the way, as is also 
Isaac Watts, no less famous than Charles Wesley as 
a hymn writer, John Bunyan, author of "Pilgrim's 
Progress," and Daniel Defoe, whose "Robinson 
Crusoe" has been the delight of every generation 
of boys that has grown up since its publication. 

HISTORIC PLACES IN LONDON. 
London is full of just such historic places. Not 
far from St. James's palace we saw the house 
where Byron "woke up to find himself famous"; 
in Chelsea we saw the homes of George Eliot, 
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and the artist Turner; 
near Whitehall is the place where Charles I. was 
beheaded; the house given to the Duke of Wel- 
lington by the English people (just as Americans 
gave a house to Admiral Dewey) is pointed out; 
in the crypt of St. Paul's are the tombs of Wel- 
lington and Nelson; and in Westminster Abbey, 
those of Chaucer, Dickens, Tennyson, Browning, 
Thackeray, William Pitt, William E. Gladstone, 
besides numerous English monarchs, including 
Queen Elizabeth, Queen Mary, and the royal Ed- 
wards and Henrys. In Westminster Abbey we 
also saw the coronation chairs in which all the 
Kings of England have been crowned here since 



58 

Edward I., and in the Bloody Tower the crowns 
of the King and Queen, sparkling masses of the 
costliest jewels, are shown to the public. 

STRATFORD, OXFORD, AND CHESTER. 

Writing this much, however, has only served to 
convince me of the impossibility of giving within 
the limits of a newspaper article any adequate 
description of the many towns and places here in 
which mighty men have wrought mighty deeds, 
blessing not only the little island of Great Britain, 
but the whole world in fact, and especially the 
great English-speaking peoples of the United 
States and Canada. 

There is the beautiful little town of Stratford-on- 
Avon where we saw the humble cottage in which 
Shakespeare was born^ and his burial place in the 
church, with the famous epitaph, "Curst be he that 
moves my bones;" there is Oxford with its famous 
University, and its rich heritage of splendid names 
■ — Blackstone, Raleigh, Wesley, Samuel Johnson, 
Wellington, Peel, Ruskin, and many others; there 
is Chester with its famous Cathedral and its near- 
ly nineteen hundred years of known history, Ro- 
man ruins here still telling the story of its begin- 
nings as a Roman camp sixty-one years after the 
birth of Christ — so short a time after the cruci- 
fixion that an historical novelist might imagine as 



59 

transferred hither some of the very soldiers who 
represented the imperial Caesar upon Golgotha's 
hill. Or with the unquestioned historical fact of 
Charles I. watching from Chester walls the defeat 
of his forces at Marston Moor, the same novelist 
might wonder if the proud monarch dreamed here 
of the headsman's axe which was to be his end. 
My next letter will find me in Prance. 



VII. 
"The Pleasant Land of France." 

Paris, France. 
"The pleasant land of France" — so it is called, 
and it is well-named. It is indeed a beautiful 
country, the fields tilled like gardens, the road- 
sides lined with beautiful and shapely trees, the 
small areas in forest given almost as much atten- 
tion as our cultivated fields, the houses neat and 
well-kept, the fields dotted with busy and seem- 
ingly prosperous workers. The farming districts 
are a 'delight to the eye, as well as an unending 
source of pleasure to any one who delights in in- 
telligent and well-directed industry. The red- 
tiled roofs of the stone and brick houses, the gold 
of the harvest -fields (for the wheat is just now 
being harvested), the dark green of the growing 
crops cultivated alongside, interspersed with slen- 
der and stately trees — all this makes a picture 
whose beauty is entirely unmarred by one gully 
or galled spot or "turned out" field or weedy 
patch or shackly cabin. 

LAND CULTIVATED A THOUSAND YEARS AND 
NOT "WORN-OUT." 
This land I see before me here was probably in 
cultivation for centuries before the first white man 



61 

alarmed the stolid American 'Indian on his hunt- 
ing grounds, and has made crops ever since — and 
yet no one thinks of saying that this French soil 
is "worn out" or "needs resting." With intelli- 
gent labor and prudent handling this land, a 
thousand years in use, is still highly productive; 
in our country unintelligent labor and careless 
handling have ruined wide areas which have not 
grown crops one-twentieth as long. 

And the main secret? It is here before me now 
— these great herds of grazing cattle in the fields 
alongside the growing crops, and these farmers 
with three-horse teams preparing the land for a 
new crop (rolling it and preparing it as thor- 
oughly as an American would do for a garden in 
order that another crop may start to growing as 
quickly as one is taken off). 

KEEP SOME CROP ON THE LAND ALL THE 
TIME. 
I noticed to-day that where the wheat has been 
harvested a day or two the shocks are piled to- 
gether on narrow strips here and there and all 
the land between is already broken for another 
planting. The land is cultivated in long strips, 
and there is hardly a foot of soil wasted; the 
wheat strip adjoins squarely the strip devoted to 
sugar beets, potatoes, etc., and there is no room 



62 

for a weed to grow — barely enough for the horses 
to turn round between fields. I recall how the 
Italian immigrants in Mississippi follow out this 
same idea, and how the neatly hoed ends of their 
cotton rows contrast with the ragged weed patch- 
es of the negro's fields. Here in France you see 
no clods, no gullies, no weeds, no poor horses 
and cattle, no scrub hogs, no disgraceful tenant 
cabins. 

Hardly anywhere in the world do so many far- 
mers own their own farms as here — small farms, 
to be sure, but the intelligent small farmer here 
with five or ten acres lives far more comfortably 
than the Southern farmer owning twenty times 
this area who depends upon shiftless labor or 
shiftless methods of cultivation. With this letter 
I am sending an extract from yesterday's Paris 
edition of the London Mail, telling how some 
French gardeners, taking up a two-acre patch of 
tough clay in Essex, had sold £1,000 (equal to 
$4,860 American money) worth of product up to 
July 2 6th, and expect to sell enough more before 
the end of the year to bring the total to about 
£800 ($4,000) per acre for the twelve months' 
sales. 

A LAND OF PROSPEROUS SMALL FARMERS. 
The farms are so small here that it is expen- 
sive to have improved machinery, but this diffi- 



63 

culty is obviated by co-operative buying: jBlve or 
six farmers with adjoining tracts will purchase a 
reaper together, or a harrow, or thresher. The 
strong, heavily built horses are a delight to the 
eye, and some oxen are also used. I saw a reaper 
in the wheat field yesterday drawn by two yoke 
of oxen. 

Women work much in the fields: I saw num- 
bers of them doing all sorts of work yesterday: 
not in any half-hearted or humdrum fashion, but 
healthy, intelligent-looking women who work 
earnestly and cheerily, simply because on these 
small acres every one must work if the family is 
to prosper, and because every member of the fam- 
ily takes pride in having a beautiful home and a 
beautiful farm, as fertile and productive as intel- 
ligence and skill can make it. 

The strength of France is its millions of con- 
tented, prosperous, intelligent small farmers who 
own their own homes, and who make the entire 
country a dream of beauty and prosperous 
activity. 

INTERESTING STORY OF SUGAR BEET CUL- 
TURE. 

Large acres here are devoted to growing the 
sugar beet, and its history also illustrates the 
possibilities of scientific agriculture. Originally 
the beet contained so little sugar that its cultiva- 



64 

tion was barely profitable, but by long years of 
careful seed selection and plant breeding, the su- 
gar content has been so largely increased that the 
industry is now one of very considerable propor^ 
tions. I should be afraid to quote figures from 
memory, but my impression is that the farmers 
now get two or four times as much sugar from a 
ton of beets as their fathers did from the less 
highly improved varieties they grew fifty years 
ago. 

HOW GOOD ROADS HELP FRENCH IN- 
DUSTRIES. 

And the roads — they, too, add incalculably to 
the beauty of the country and to the pleasure of 
country life. National aid to road building and 
road improvement, as has been much agitated in 
America in recent years (notably by Latimer of 
South Carolina, Brownlow of Tennessee, and 
Bankhead of Alabama) is an actual working fact 
here in France, the main lines being built and 
maintained by the National Government, the mile- 
age being 23,656, and $300,000,000 having been 
spent in this work to date. Even the local roads 
are kept in superb condition, and some one re- 
cently pointed out the difference between French 
and American roads by showing that in France 
one horse is expected to carry a load of 3,300 



65 

pounds twenty miles a day over rolling country, 
while in America one horse would carry only 
1,000 to 1,400 pounds. 

The difference may be partly due to the superi- 
ority of the French horses, the heavy Percherons 
and other breeds in use here being, as I have in- 
dicated, markedly superior to ours, but the main 
difference is, of course, attributable to the better 
highways in France. 

ARTISTS WOUKING "ON A CANVAS OF EARTH 
AND ACRES." 
And not only are the roads themselves in the 
splendid condition I have indicated, but every 
highway is made a thing of beauty by the long 
lines of tall, uniform, symmetrical shade trees on 
either hand. These have been carefully planted, 
of course: all of one variety, and equidistant. The 
common roads are therefore as beautiful as our 
city parks, and when you look out upon the vary- 
ing tints of the growing and ripening crops, and 
the perfect proportions of each field, it seems as 
if the very peasants here were artists working 
out some vision on a canvas of earth and acres 
instead of on one of fabric and inches. Usually 
there are no fences between one small farm and 
another: possibly a hedge, but more often one 
farmers last row of potatoes, or a trench at most, 



66 

is the dividing line between him and his neigh- 
bors. As one of my friends wrote me from Eng- 
land two years ago: "There are no loose ends or 
ragged edges in English farming." 

NO LANDS WASTED OR ^MISTREATED. 

No one looking at the farming of France can 
get away from the impression that just as it is a 
curse to a growing boy to have a fortune that he 
may spend recklessly, so it has been a curse to 
America that land has been so plentiful that the 
farmer has thought it no economic crime to lay 
waste one acre and then clear up another to take 
its place. Neither here nor in England would 
any land-owner think for a moment of renting a 
piece of land to an ignorant tenant to butcher or 
maltreat in such fashion as is common in the 
South. In France, as I have said, most farms are 
small and operated by their owners — the ideal 
condition; while in England the tenant is encour- 
aged to improve and beautify his holdings: my 
recollection is that tenants usually lease for about 
ten years and are given credit at the end of that 
time for whatever improvements they have made. 

And not only have French farmers wrought out 
these things in their own land, but they have car- 
ried these progressive ideas with them wherever 
they have gone. If any reader object that they 
might not do so well in the Cotton States of 



67 

America, let me remind !um of wliat French col- 
onists and French influence have done in the 
worn Barbary coast of Africa. It is a matter of 
casual historical comment that in one or two gen- 
erations French rule has built up its depleted ag- 
riculture and "has restored the fertility and 
bloom which belonged to it when it was the gar- 
'den of the Roman .world." 

A STORY SUGGESTED BY MY POCKETBOOK. 
Of the Government of France I must also say a 
word, and then leave my impressions of Paris for 
another letter. As everybody knows, France from 
1789 to 1871 was in a state of almost unending 
turmoil. The year first mentioned opens upon 
one of the most corrupt, extravagant, stiff-necked 
and irresponsible courts with which any Nation 
has ever been afflicted. The nightmare of the 
French Revolution, the dictatorship of Napoleon, 
the restored dynasty of the Bourbons forced upon 
the people by the conquering nations after Water- 
loo (1815), the Revolution of 1830 that made 
Louis Philippe King, the "second Republic" es- 
tablished by the Revolution of 1848, the "second 
Empire" that followed four years later, and fin- 
ally the "third Republic" which has now endured 
for about thirty years — this is a suggestion of the 
kaleidoscopic changes whose details baffle the 
memory and leave the average reader in hopeless 



68 

confusion. I have just noticed, for example, that 
in my purse are three pieces of money, one bear- 
ing the name of "Louis Philippe, King, 1843," an- 
other that of "Napoleon Til., Emperor, 1860," 
and the third that of the "Republic of France, 
1896." In effect France v/as for a hundred years 
a sort of political experiment station, but the 
present republican government now seems firmly 
established. 

HOW THE FRENCH PEOPLE ARE GOVERNED 
NOW. 
The President is elected for a term of seven 
years. The Congress consists of a "House of 
Deputies" corresponding to our National House of 
Representatives, chosen by manhood suffrage for 
four years; the Senators, like ours, hold for six 
years, and are elected in practically the same 
manner. But now come some radical differences 
between our system and the French system. In 
the first place, the President has no such power 
as the President of the United States. Like the 
King of England, he is little more than a figure 
head, and the real executive work is done through 
a Cabinet or ministry. The President nominates 
the ministers but they can not act until the House 
of Deputies accepts them, and in a crisis the 
House can force the President to resign by refus- 
ing to accept his ministers at all. Moreover, the 



69 

ministry itself must resign when the House of 
Deputies refuses to support the ministers' meas- 
ures, so that the real governing power of France 
Is the House elected direct by manhood suffrage. 
It is much as if our National House of Represen- 
tatives in America could compel the President or 
his Cabinet to resign by refusing to support their 
policies. This, of course, means a government 
more quickly responsive to public opinion: if the 
United States were governed by the French plan, 
the election of a Democratic House of Represent- 
atives in November would put that party in vir- 
tual control of the entire Government at once. 

The dominant party in France now is what is 
called the Radical-Socialist, though it is by no 
means so extreme as the name sounds. There is 
another party, (the "Extreme Socialists," I be- 
lieve they are called), who stand more nearly for 
the doctrines of American socialism. The policy 
of the present government looks only to public 
ownership of what we call "natural monopolies" 
— railways, street-car systems, municipal lighting 
plants, etc. The people already own the tele- 
graph and telephone, and plans are now on foot 
looking to the purchase of the great Western 
Railway by the Government, as a start in the di- 
rection of general government ownership. 



Napoleon's Tomb and Versailles. 

Paris, France. 

He was not a young man swept off his feet by 
youthful enthusiasm: he was a man upon whose 
head were the snows of more than three-score 
winters but whose mind is as active as ever, and 
he was talking to me last spring of his trip to 
Europe, and especially of the magnificent maus- 
oleum which the French people have erected as 
the last resting place of Napoleon Bonaparte. 

"By Heaven," he exclaimed, "it was worth the 
trip across the Atlantic to stand at the tomb of 
that colossal man!" 

AT THE TOMB OF NAPOLEON. 
I am now almost prepared to agree with him: 
certainly I have seen nothing more impressive 
since I left America. The splendid structure, 
beautiful and airy as a palace, built entirely of 
white marble and surmounted by a gilded dome, 
itself challenges interest and admiration; but it 
is only when we enter the spacious chapel that 
the sublimity of the builder's conception dawns 
upon us. Here is solemnity unmarred by any 
suggestion of the funereal: the majesty of death 
without any trace of its gruesomeness. Massive 



71 

bronze doors guard the entrance to where the 
body rests in the immense sarcophagus, and by the 
side of the doors are two kingly statues bearing 
in their hands the symbols of earthly power and 
dominion, the one the globe and the sword, the 
other the crown and the sceptre. On either side 
stained glass windows such as I have seen no- 
where else in the world let in the light in a golden 
flood suggesting the beauty and the calm of an 
unending sunset. Above you are the words from 
Napoleon's will, [written in exile in distant St.' 
Helena: "I desire that my body shall rest on the 
banks of the Seine, and among the French people 
whom I have loved so well." There is pathos un- 
speakable about the words and about the tragedy 
which they call to mind. Once he could have 
willed kingdoms and crowns; the proudest thrones 
of Europe had been at his disposal, and he had 
given sceptres to his brothers and his favorites as 
if crowns were but the baubles of an hour. Now 
the Napoleon who makes his last testament sees 
Death, the conqueror of conquerors, coming as a 
.welcome relief, and he who — 

"once trod the ways of glory 
And sounded all the depths and shoals of honor," 

can will little but his body itself, and cannot know 
that even this request for a burial place will be 
granted. Weary and heart-sick, broken with the 



72 

storms of state, how it would have rejoiced his 
heart could he have known with what honor his 
ashes would finally be entombed in his loved 
Paris and how here for aeons to come travelers 
from every corner of the earth would pause to pay 
tribute to one of the mightiest men .who ever 
walked this globe of ours. 

THE THREEFOLD CHARACTER OF NA- 
POLEON'S APPEAL TO US. 

The fame of Napoleon is the surer because of 
the threefold character of his appeal to human 
interest — the romance of his rise, the epic of his 
achievement, the tragedy of his fall: each in it- 
self sublime. Born of humble parents and upon 
a narrow island, his imperial mind and will won 
him place after place until he became the might- 
iest name in a thousand years of history. Power 
such as the Caesars had not known was his, and 
when he walked into the church of St. Denis here 
to wed the daughter of a King, he might have 
dreamed not without warrant of becoming the 
master of all Europe. 

He had great faults, I grant, but in character 
few of our chiefest warrior-rulers stand above 
him; and so long as the minds of men are stirred 
by mighty deeds wrought in spite of frowning cir- 
cumstance, and so long as men's hearts are moved 



73 

by the tragedy of a great man's fall, just so long 
will tlie blood quicken when Napoleon's name is 
mentioned, and just so long will men make pil- 
grimage here, as I have done to Notre Dame 
where he was crowned, to St. Denis where he 
married, to the mausoleum where he is buried, 
and to the Museum of History where so many 
relics, both of his noonday glory and of his twi- 
light in lonely St. Helena, are shown to interested 
thousands. 

Of so much interest is the career of Napoleon, 
and I have seen so many traces of his footsteps 
here — some of his letters, his coronation robes, 
his bed-room and reception-rooms at Versailles, 
the unpromising-looking rooms overlooking the 
Seine where he lodged before he became famous, 
his chair and bench and camp-bed from St. 
Helena, and his sword, saddle, hat and his famous 
war coat — that it is hard not to give an entire ar- 
ticle to this one subject; but I must hurry on, 
for Paris is full of historic and notable spots, and 
I am trying to tell in a letter what should be told 
in a book. 

IN THE ROYAL PALACE OF VERSAILLES. 
Our first full day in Paris was spent at Ver- 
sailles, where the French Kings once lived in 
shameless extravagance and unconcern, and where 



a corrupt and profligate court once piled up wrath 
against the day of wrath, until the storm broke 
in blood and fury upon them some six score years 
ago. For long, long decades had the weary peas- 
ants of France toiled from year's end to year's 
end, only to see King and priest and noble seize 
the lion's share of their hard-won harvests, gov- 
ernment and church all the while growing more 
haughty and corrupt, and the burdened peasant's 
lot harder and more hopeless. Stolid and spirit- 
less perhaps this peasant seemed to the proud 
nobles who lived upon his labors and despised 
him, who felt that neither he nor his family had 
any rights that they were bound to respect; and 
yet an Edwin Markham would have seen in this 
oppressed and clouted figure the portent and 
prophecy of the coming Revolution. 

"O masters, lords and rulers in all lands, 
How will the future reckon with this Man? 
How answer his brute question in that hour 
When whirlwinds of rebellion shake the world? 
How will it be with kingdoms and with kings — ■ 
With those who shaped him to the thing he is — 
When this dumb Terror shall reply to God 
After the silence of the centuries?" 

Let us go then to Versailles to-day and see 
where the French Babylon once reared its lofty 
head, where women as vile as they were beauti- 
ful once ruled the court of France and where the 



75 

peasant's hard-earned taxes were wasted in vice 
and gambling and display. Here before us now 
is the gorgeous bed upon which Louis XIV., "the 
Grand Monarch," died in 1715, and we may well 
wonder if in death the avenging angel did not 
whisper to him of the impending doom which his 
folly had done so much to insure; or if neither he 
nor his yet more worthless successor, Louis XV., 
(who died in the room to our left), did not once 
stumble upon a hearing or reading of that pas- 
sage wherein we are told that the cries of the 
defrauded laborer have "entered into the ears of 
the Lord of Sabaoth," and — 

"Your riches are corrupted and your gar- 
ments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver 
is cankered and the rust of them shall be a 
witness against you, and shall eat your flesh 
as it were fire." 

THE LESSON OF THE ANCIENT COURT. 

We may not know whether or not this fearful 
v/arning ever came to the ears of the pleasure- 
loving court that once flitted through the royal 
palace of Versailles, but the record of these his- 
toric walls only affords fresh proof that the Apos- 
tle's language is sound political as well as re- 
ligious doctrine. The mills of the gods grind 
slowly, but they grind exceding small. The 
avenging Nemesis of nations never sleeps; the 



76 

relentless rectitude of Nature never fails. On 
heedless ears too often falls tlie phrase, "The 
wages of sin is death," and yet all human history, 
even more loudly than the Book of Books itself, 
proclaims the truth of this everlasting doctrine. 
To-day "careless seems the Great Avenger" as we 
look upon Versailles, and with our mind's eye 
people it again with those lordly figures who 
"have lived in pleasure on the earth and been 
wanton, who have condemned and killed the 
Just"; but yonder in the distance looms the Place 
la Concorde where with our mind's eye we see 
the bloody guillotine, and the heads of King and 
Queen and nobles required in this final settle- 
ment with long delayed and patient justice. The 
debt of the ages is settled. Those who have sown 
the wind have reaped the whirlwind — or alas! in 
too many cases, not they themselves, but their 
children and children's children. 

THE RELENTLESS RECTITUDE OP NATURE. 
This is the tragedy of life — that Nature, itself 
immortal, reckons not of man's mortality. Your 
father owed a debt and died having enjoyed but 
not having settled: and you, standing in his place, 
must pay. Your father through sin and crime 
made grievous debt to Nature, and his children, 
with meaner souls and diseased bodies, must pay 



77 

the price. And even so one generation of citizens 
permits injustice, fosters evil, — whether by indif- 
ference or by vicious intent, it matters not — and 
the next generation must pay the price in war 
and riot and revolution. Our Revolutionary fath- 
ers in America, North and South, tempted of 
Mammon, permitted and encouraged the sin of 
human slavery; our fathers a generation ago, 
from North and South, paid the awful price in 
peace and blood and treasure. The French nobil- 
ity for centuries ground the faces of the poor, 
violated their homes, robbed them of the fruits 
of their labor, until the French Revolution, the 
hideous progeny of their long, long years of evil, 
came forth in the fullness of time to plague their 
children and to stand forever as one of the most 
fearful nightmares of human history. Read 
Dickens's "Tale of Two Cities" and the story of 
the prisoner in the Bastille (Dr. Manette, I think. 
Is the name), and you will wonder how any one 
could have expected any other harvest from such 
a sowing. 

For the excesses of the Revolution I have no 
excuse; no one is further than I from wishing to 
palliate its own shameful crimes. But no one 
Who knows history can stand to-day at Versailles 
and think of its corrupt court, the symbol of 
wrong and oppression, and then stand to-morrow 



78 

at the Place la Concorde and think of the hun- 
dreds of nobles whose lives the infuriated popu- 
lace here required, and not see that the one fol- 
lows the other as inevitably as the night the day. 
With nations as with individuals, it is the weary 
round of history: to-day you make the debt; to- 
morrow you must pay the price. Whatsoever man 
or nation soweth that also shall man or nation 
reap. 



IX. 

A Land Where Everybody Works. 

Cologne^ Germany. 

In my letter just preceding my last, I had much 
to say concerning the excellence of French farm- 
ing, but I have since seen an even more highly 
developed system of agriculture than that I found 
in France. There is perhaps no more careful farm- 
ing anywhere on earth than in the little countries 
of Belgium and Holland through which I have 
now been traveling for some days, while in Ger- 
many, which I have just reached, the land appears- 
to be little less fruitful. 

Neither Belgium nor Holland is more than one- 
fifth the size of an average Southern State, yet 
each supports a population three times as large. 
If either North Carolina or Mississippi were as 
thickly settled as Belgium, the population would 
be about 30,000,000, or one-third that of the en- 
tire United States. And yet so carefully is the 
land cultivated that Belgium, I understand, makes 
more than enough bread not only for its great 
rural population, but for its millions and millions 
of tov/nspeople and factory-workers as well. Think 
of one Southern State m^aking produce enough to 
feed one-third of the people in America! 



80 

THE KINGLY HORSES OF BELGIUM AND 

HOLLAND. 
And the horses, the magnificent horses — they 
are themselves worth coming across the ocean to 
see! If I had wanted anything else to convince me 
of the necessity of fighting for better work horses 
in the South, this trip to Europe would have sup- 
plied it. Do you remember that picture we had 
on our first page about six weeks ago, "The Sort 
of Work Horses Western Farmers Use," showing 
four, big, muscular, magnificent-looking horses 
ready to hitch to the harrow? The picture must 
have impressed you, for we don't often see such 
big, strong fellows in the Cotton Belt. Well, any- 
how, it is horses such as these that you see on 
European farms, and it is with them that the 
farmers here break and cultivate the land with 
such thoroughness as to produce the splendid 
crops I have seen growing everywhere T have yet 
been. 

As for the draft horses in the cities, they have 
been the admiration of our entire party. College 
professors, college girls, lawyers — everybody has 
paid the Dutch and Belgian horses tributes of in- 
terest, inspection, and praise such as even the 
masterpieces of art in the great galleries here 
have not always called forth. "Why, they look as 



big as Barnum's elephants," was the not unjus- 
tifiable declaration of a young lady as the great 
Percherons passed by us. Kingly horses, bearing 
themselves as if conscious of royal blood, strong 
as lions, but thoroughly gentle, beautiful in form, 
hauling gigantic loads on wagons which when 
empty would alone make good loads for the miser- 
able-looking dray horses belabored by negro driv- 
ers in our Southern towns — and doing it all with 
;such wonderful ease and with such majesic and 
rhythmical movements that it is a positive pleas- 
ure just to watch them for an hour at a time. 

"I HAVEN'T SEEN A HORSE'S RIBS IN 
EUROPE!" 
Over here in Europe the farmers believe In 
three things: (1) Good stock; (2) plenty of it; 
(3) good care of it. The only exception I would 
make to this last statement is the cow. It rather 
goes against the grain with me to see cows hitched 
to carts like oxen, as is commonly done in many 
European countries, especially Germany; but even 
these cows, I must say, seem sleek, well-fed and 
in good spirits. I haven't seen a horse's ribs nor 
a cow's since I have been in Europe: the Euro- 
pean won't have poor stock. Neither have I seen 
a mule — and of course there are no negroes, ex- 
cept a few negro tourists. 



82 

Before passing to any other question, however, 
let me correct any impression that the cow is dis- 
criminated against over here in that she must of- 
ten pull carts or ploughs, and so assist in making 
and harvesting the crops. In Europe everything 
works. That is why these countries support ten 
to twenty times the population supported by sim- 
ilar areas in America. Even the dogs are pressed 
into service, and little carts drawn by one, two 
or three big dogs are common sights in Amster- 
dam, Antwerp, and Brussels. 

THE TWO SECRETS OF GERMAN AND DUTCH 
PROSPERITY. 
The dogs work, the cows work, the wind works 
— everybody works, including father, and the very 
breezes that pass across the country are caught, 
like Kansas tramps in harvest time, harnessed 
to thousands of Dutch wind-mills, and set to 
work to grind the wheat, cut the wood, and drain 
the swamps. In Germany evven the King and the 
King's son must learn a trade, and the secret of 
the prosperity of all these crowded, over-flowing 
countries, in my opinion, lies in two things: 

(1) An intelligent population, with their natu- 
ral intelligence trained and sharpened by educa- 
tion; 

(2) No man or woman thinks of any task that 
comes to hand as being beneath him or her. 



83 

Time and again on this trip have I seen hotel 
proprietors or managers, men of education, intel- 
ligence, and refinement, come into kitchen or din- 
ing-room in case of a rush and assist in waiting 
on the table as if it were the most natural thing 
in the world. And this is but an illustration of 
the general attitude here toward all work. "What- 
soever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy 
might" was good doctrine in Solomon's time, and it 
is good doctrine for Europe, the Cotton States, or 
for any other part of the world to-day. Dr. Wal- 
ter H. Page never said a truer thing than when 
he declared: "It is better to make good split- 
bottom chairs than it is to be an unproductive 
'prominent citizen.' " 

WITHOUT INTELLIGENT LABOR NO NATION 
CAN PROSPER. 
Badly doing v/ork degrades it: that is the trou- 
ble with us in the South. Our old slave-holding 
aristocracy set the ignorant new-caught African 
savage to doing work for them, and he worked so 
badly that they began to think it discreditable to 
be a worker at all. What I have seen in Europe 
thus far has only deepened and confirmed the con- 
viction which travel and observation in the South 
from Virginia to Texas had already developed in 
my mind, namely: that lack of intelligence or 



84 

education on the part of any considerable part of 
its population is a mill-stone about the neck of 
any community. 

There is no task under Heaven which an intel- 
ligent man cannot do better and cheaper than an 
unintelligent man; there is no work under Heaven 
which cannot be done better and more cheaply by 
educated labor than by uneducated. There is no 
other way given among men whereby a nation can 
achieve greatness than by training, developing 
and educating its people, its common people. 
Every live, forceful nation in Europe to-day bears 
witness to this truth: in them you see even the 
cab drivers reading the daily papers with the 
same intelligent interest with which merchants 
and lawyers seem to read them in America, and 
even the peasants here in their plain clothes go 
to see the great masterpieces of art, as some of 
them were doing when I stood with them in Am- 
sterdam to admire Rembrandt's most famous pic- 
tures. 

GERMANY AND SPAIN CONTRASTED. 

Take Germany with her magnificent system of 
industrial schools, the best in the world, and her 
industrious and prosperous people who have sent 
articles with the brand "Made in Germany" into 
every quarter of the globe: then contrast this 
strong and powerful nation and her skilled and 



85 

educated workers with degenerate Spain where 
free thought has been stifled for centuries and 
education neglected. In Spain you find the real 
"Man With the Hoe" whom Markham depicted in 
his matchless poem: hopeless workers, "brothers 
to the ox," who cultivate narrow patches without 
horses, breaking the land by digging it up with 
short-handled, back-breaking, mattock-like grub- 
bing hoes; and the land going to waste for lack 
of intelligent attention. Spain (with more than 
half her people illiterate) bankrupt, poverty- 
stricken, 'despised; Germany (with her magnificent 
trdae schools and general system of education) 
progressing more rapidly this last generation than 
possibly any other nation in the world, if due al- 
lowance be made for the difference in natural re- 
sources between Germany and America during 
this period! 

Small wonder that when Germany whipped 
dumbfounded France with such astounding celer- 
ity in 1870, Prance proceeded to make inquiry as 
to the secret of Germany's wonderful strength — 
and at once adopted the German idea of thorough 
and compulsory public education for all her ovm 
people: the effects of which are now also seen in 
the unexampled prosperity of France, whose peo- 
ple have become the richest in all Europe. 



6 



83 

GERMAN EDUCATION IS PRACTICAL. 

Education in Germany has been made to train 
for actual life and work: that is the secret, and 
It is a lesson which we in the South cannot take 
too seriously to heart. If German authorities had 
been in charge of Southern education, we should 
have had splendidly equipped agricultural high 
schools in every county or Congressional District 
long before this, and the elements of agriculture 
and domestic science would be taught in every 
rural school, whether elementary school or acad- 
emy. 

To me it is positively heart-sickening to go out 
into the academies in our country districts in the 
South and see girls who are going to be farmers' 
wives struggling with the conjugation of Latin 
verbs while they learn never a thing about the 
chemistry of bread-making and do not even know 
when a meat should be put into the water after 
it is boiling and when it should be put in while 
the water is cold. Their husbands and children 
will have their lives saddened and shortened by 
Indigestion and improper nutrition — but of course 
It would be undignified and therefore unthinkable 
for sweet college girls to learn anything about 
cooking! 

And the boys who are going to be farmers — 
they are also studying Caesar and "latitude and 



87 

longitude" and "the metric system of weights and 
measures" while they learn nothing whatever of 
how to compound a feeding ration so as to get 
milk or butter cheapest, and nothing whatever of 
soil fertility and its management, by which the 
$60,000,000 a year spent by farmers in Georgia 
and adjoining States might be largely saved! But, 
of course, that, too, would be undignified, and it 
might shock your professor if you were to bring 
the matter to his attention. 

ONE STUPENDUOUS FALLACY WE MUST PUT 
FOREVER BEHIND US. 

The whole tragic system is an outgrowth of our 
idea that labor is degrading, and this is the fal- 
lacy we must put forever behind us before we can 
ever measure up to our opportunities. When man 
had once fallen, had once eaten the forbidden 
fruit, the only way the Lord Himself could find 
to keep him from going utterly to the Devil, was 
to put him to work; and it is high time for us to 
come to see that com roots and cotton roots are 
just as honorable and legitimate subjects of in- 
terest and mental development as Greek roots and 
Latin roots. 

Take my own case now in connection with this 
very European trip: When I was in a country 
school I spent considerable time studying about 



88 

English money, but when I reached Scotland the 
other week I didn't know the worth of a shilling 
nor how many pence it takes to make one. I also 
spent some time as a farm boy studying the me- 
tric system of weights and measures, but now 
that I have reached a metric system country at 
last, I have no idea in the world as to how much 
a kilometer is. 

AH this information perished with the learning 
' — even for me, although I have made a trip to 
Europe as not one school-boy in a thousand ever 
grows up to do. It would have been knowledge 
that would have stayed with me, knowledge that 
would have been put to interest in all the life 
around me, if I had learned in the school about 
the laws of plant and animal life, about how to 
compound feeding rations and fertilizer formulas, 
about the breeds and types of horses, hogs, and 
cattle, etc., — and this practical and useful knowl- 
edge (as no sane man can deny) would have been 
just as useful to me in mental training as were the 
miscellaneous masses of foreign, lifeless and use- 
less information which were thrust upon me. 

LET'S LEARN A LESSON FROM GERMANY. 
It is the same way with the education of our 
girls. A young woman — and an unusually intel- 
ligent young woman, too, — who was with me in 



89 

Paris the other day had spent four years studying 
French at one of our Southern colleges, and yet 
in the five or six years' time since then she had 
forgotten the language so completely that she 
couldn't even bargain with the cabman about our 
trip to St. Denis Church. And she studied chem- 
istry, too, — though to make this practical and ap- 
ply the. principles of chemistry to cooking in our 
girls' schools is, of course, out of the question. 

France was wise enough when Germany licked 
her, and when she saw Germany beating the 
[World in industrial skill, to wake up and adopt 
the German idea of education for her own — com- 
pulsory education, universal education, industrial 
education. The South, I repeat, should take the 
same lesson to heart. We are largely of the same 
stock as the Germans — nothing on my trip has im- 
pressed me more forcibly than the striking resem- 
blance of the men and women in a German crowd 
to those in an American crowd — and the same 
policies of practical education and training which 
have made the German people prosperous and 
powerful will work a like revolution in the South. 

Let us set ourselves to the task. 



X. 

Wise Economies America Should Learn 
From Europe. 

Heidelberg, Germany. 

There are so many beautiful and notable places 
in Europe that I could give all my time in these 
letters to mere descriptions of interesting towns, 
cathedrals, public buildings, rivers, mountains, 
etc., if I were so inclined, and if other writ- 
ers had not already written of them in far more 
entertaining fashion than I could hope to do. But 
until our people come to a greater appreciation of 
the beautiful that is at our own doors in America, 
I do not think it worth my while to take up space 
in extensive descriptions of Europe's far-away 
glories. 

Besides, it is the common beauties round about 
us that are most worthy of our attention, anyhow. 
Every fair day the sunset paints a picture for you 
more splendid and inspiring than any artist has 
ever yet been able to put upon canvas. Every 
night the Heavens "declare the glory of God and 
the firmament showeth His handiwork" to a great- 
er degree than any other natural scenery in the 
world. I like that story of the old Scotchman 
who went up the little mountain peak every morn- 



91 

ing to see the suTi rise and "to take off his hat 
to the glory of the world," as he expressed it. 
"The meanest flower that blows" has interest and 
meaning, and for every person who loves the true 
and the beautiful — 

"Earth's crammed with Heaven 
And every common bush afire with God." 

AMERICA WASTING OPPORTUNITIES FOR 
BEAUTY. 
If our farms were only as carefully tilled, if 
our farm-houses were only as tastefully built and 
painted, if there were the same wealth of shrub 
and vine and flower about them, and if we could 
do away with ramshackle cabins and scrubby, ill- 
fed stock (and put in about five times as much 
good stock instead), America would be as beauti- 
ful as Europe. 

The trouble is that America is wasting oppor- 
tunities for beauty just as it is wasting its oppor- 
tunities for a thousand other things. Before I 
left New York I wrote that I was coming back to 
"our old home," back to the old homestead from 
which we Americans went out to seek better for- 
tunes in a new world; and in coming back to the 
ancestral dwelling-place nothing has impressed 
me more than the fact that we, too, are playing 
the prodigal son,, and wasting our substance in 



92 

Hotous living. The wastes of America would make 
Europe rich. No wonder President Roosevelt 
called together the Governors of all the States 
and some of the country's leading thinkers and 
scientists to meet in Washington City last spring 
in a "Conference for the Conservation of Our Na- 
tural Resources." 

NO GULLIED LAND IN GERMANY. 
I saw more gullied, wasted, desolated, heart- 
sickening land in fifteen minutes' time between 
Birmingham and Memphis last April than I have 
seen in a thousand miles of European travel up to 
this time. The steep banks of the river Rhine 
are as carefully cultivated as a garden. Rock 
terrace after rock terrace has been built above 
you to keep the land from washing. I recall 
counting at one place thirteen distinct rows of 
stone terraces on one hill-side, and on others 
there were an even larger number. It is on such 
land that the famous Rhine vineyards are culti- 
vated — on land often so steep that a horse cannot 
walk over it, and all the work must be done by 
hand. And in Germany, as well as in Belgium, 
France, and Holland, great numbers of cattle are 
grown, and the land carefully enriched with the 
manure. Mr. R. H. Battle was telling me only a 
short time before I left home of a German tenant 



93 

he had some years ago. "The man wanted to put 
everything back on the land," said Mr. Battle; 
"his sole idea seemed to be to build it up and en- 
rich it." And this feeling was so different from 
the unsual land-skinning ideas of Southern ten- 
ants that Mr. Battle was naturally amazed. The 
legumes are largely raised here, too, — alfalfa and 
the clovers; and almost every field bears evidence 
of a systematic rotation of crops. 

HOW THE FORESTS ARE CARED FOR. 
Then take the forests. Over here their owners 
have come to see what we in America have not 
yet come to understand, namely, that the timber 
crop is a crop just as surely as corn or cotton, 
even if it does take years instead of months for it 
to reach the harvesting stage. And the Govern- 
ment over here, moreover, realized long ago the 
importance of forest preservation, while our Con- 
gressmen in Washington continue to kill the bills 
that would preserve the wealth of our great Ap- 
palachian and White Mountain timber lands. In 
Germany such areas are under strict Government 
supervision. Lumbermen are not permitted to 
waste the timber, but are allowed to cut only so 
much a year and of trees of the prescribed size; 
and there are also strict regulations about refor- 
esting. And if there are those who object to the 



94 

expense of maintaining such supervision, let me 
remind them that it is the experience of Germany 
that the saving through the prevention of forest 
fires alone far more than pays every expense in- 
curred in this notable and fruitful work. It is in- 
teresting to go through the woods and see how 
the trees of the right size have been marked, cut, 
and carried out without one-tenth the damage to 
other timber an average American lumberman 
would inflict. 

SAVING A COUNTRY'S BEST RESOURCES. 

Not only are the resources of land and forest 
thus carefully conserved, but the greatest re- 
sources of any nation — the minds of its people — are 
trained and developed, as I set forth in my last 
letter, by a splendid scheme of public education, 
universal, industrial, and even compulsory. More 
early here than in America, too, was the folly of 
grinding out the lives and stunting the bodies of 
children in factory work, recognized and rem- 
edied. It has been only a few years since the 
great State of South Carolina officially advertised 
its own shame by publishing as an inducement for 
capital and for immigration that it had no laws 
regulating hours of labor or ages for employment, 
while wiser England more than sixty years ago 
saw the folly of ruining its future citizenship and 



95 

adopted a general ten-hour policy in her factories 
— providing, too, for a rigid system of factory in- 
spection, the absence of which has made many a 
so-called child-labor law in the South a snare and 
a delusion. 

The actual saving of human life itself also has 
far more attention here than in America. I 
should be afraid to quote figures from memory, 
but I know that in the matter of railroad wrecks, 
for example, the American lines, in proportion to 
traffic handled, kill and wound a fearfully and 
shockingly larger number of passengers and em- 
ployees. European superiority here is partly due 
to the use of a better signal and checking service, 
thereby preventing many collisions; partly to the 
general absence of level crossings, the railroad 
tracks going either under or over the public road, 
and partly to the tracks being freed from pedes- 
trians by protecting hedges or fences. 

One other illustration of the greater care of 
life and property over here, and I am done with 
that division of my subject. I refer to the better 
regulations for fire-prevention in towns and cities 
• — stricter rules in regard to the erection of build- 
ings, etc., etc. Only this week an English au- 
thority has published the exact figures regarding 
comparative fire losses in Europe and America for 
a series of years, showing the per capita loss 



96 

in America to be more than nine times as great 
as here. 

All these things, together with other facts. that 
I have already given with regard to agriculture, 
and might give with regard to other things, are 
enough, I submit, to warrant my conclusions, 
first, that we Americans, going from this old 
European home to the far, strange land of Amer- 
ica, have literally played the part of the prodigal 
son of the parable; and, second, that Europe 
would make itself rich on what America wastes. 

THE TORRENS SYSTEM A WORKING SUCCESS. 
And as an after-thought, T think it not out of 
place to mention here a matter whose importance 
is too little recognized in America — our wasteful, 
antiquated, and utterly unscientific method of reg- 
istering land titles. Over here the Torrens Sys- 
tem is widely in force, and greatly to the benefit 
of everybody and everything, except, possibly, a 
few jack-leg lawyers. With us every time a piece 
of real estate is transferred, a lawyer must be 
paid to investigate the title — he going to the 
court-house and searching through musty records 
of wills and deeds for generations back, and every 
time the land changes hands the same dreary, ex- 
pensive, and increasingly difficult task must be 
repeated: the same identical work repeated time 



97 

after time to no good purpose whatever. By the 
Torrens System the State once for all makes a 
thorough investigation of title, registers it in 
prescribed fashion, and guarantees the title, a 
small percentage-fraction tax from each purchaser 
sufficing to create a fund large enough for the 
State to reimburse the purchaser in the rare case 
of a mistake. By this system farmers are en- 
abled to borrow money on land and to make trans- 
fers of land as easily as of cotton-mill stock, 
while the saving to persons buying and selling 
any kind of real estate is enormous. A lawyer 
told me a short time ago that he knew of tracts 
of land one^fourth of whose total value had been 
spent in oft-repeated title investigations — a new 
investigation being required, under our foolish 
and unscientific system, ,with each change of own- 
ership. 

A number of American States have w:isely 
adopted the Torrens System by providing for the 
investigation and registration of title under its 
provisions every time an estate passes through 
the courts (this meaning that in one or two gen- 
erations practically all estates would be registered 
under the Torrens System with practically no 
extra expense) , but in the South no strong and ag- 
gressive champion of the plan has yet appeared 
save Hon. Eugene C. Massie, of Richmond, Va. 



98 

It is an excellent platform on which to send some 
strong man to your Legislature — some man who 
is not afraid to stand for an important reform, 
even though through it a thousand or two jack-leg 
lawyers and industrial parasites, Othello-like, do 
find their occupation gone, and are thereby forced 
into work which will be of some real service to 
mankind. 



XI. 

Switzerland — Two Weeks Among 

Lakes, Peaks, Glaciers, Clouds, 

and Snows. 

Brigue, Switzerland. 

I think I spoke rather slightingly in my last 
letter of coming to Europe to see scenery. 

I had not then seen the Schaffhausen Falls of 
the Rhine, no less beautiful than Niagara, though 
not so majestic and impressive. 

I had not then seen. Lucerne, girt about with 
its beautiful Alpine peaks and nestling beside one 
of the loveliest and clearest lakes in all the 
world, from whose blue waters rise the sheer 
walls of massive, heaven-kissing mountains that 
tower high above you in a rugged grandeur which 
contrasts strikingly with the serene beauty of the 
lake itself. 

MAJESTIC MOUNT JUNGFRAU AND BEAUTI- 
FUL LAKE GENEVA. 
I had not then seen titantic Mount Jungfrau, 
shouldering out the sky with its eternal man- 
tle of snow while the thick clouds gradually 
unveiled its glories to our eyes: first the great 
cap breaking out fitfully against the sky far up 



100 

above the fleecy cloud-masses, and then more 
and more of the great giant of mountains coming 
into view until the whole majestic *form, dazzling 
in the sunlight, awed us with its solemn vastness. 
There came to mind that passage in the Bible in 
which Moses asked to see the Almighty's face, 
and the Lord put him in a cleft in the rock and 
let hut a part of His beauty pass before him, lest 
the great leader of Israel should be overpowered 
by viewing too much glory at once: so was ma- 
jestic Jungfrau gradually unveiled before our 
eyes. 

I had not then seen Lake Geneva, beautiful be- 
yond the power of words to describe: breaking 
upon our sight as we came from the tunnel's 
mouth like a vision of Paradise. The day was 
perfect, and but a few long, lazy summer clouds 
nestled indistinctly against the far horizon, the 
sheen of the water mingling with them until it 
was impossible to distinguish where lake ended 
and sky began, a fairy-like sail boat drifting idly 
on the bosom of the waters completing the scene 
and making it so ethereal that one seemed to 
have come at last to the land of the lotus-eaters, 
the dreamy rest-land where it is always after- 
noon. Only the Catalina Islands off the coast 
of California have brought to my vision a scene 



101 

so little of the earth, earthy, so charged with the 
beauty and charm of the fabled isles of Hes- 
perides. 

A BELATED PROCESS OP CREATION. 

Nor had I then seen the glaciers, those great 
mills of the gods that do indeed grind slowly but 
grind exceedingly small: working with the calm 
patience of eternity, so quietly and with such su- 
preme scorn of man's feverish haste in his little 
lifetime that long generations of puny men and 
v/omen came and went before they learned that 
these titantic ice-rivers actually move at all — 
these colossal masses, miles in length and in 
width, that wear down the mountain sides with 
the relentlessness of Time and grind the might- 
iest boulders into powder, or break them into a 
thousand fragments, or carry them in a resistless 
clutch far away from the place where they were 
found. 

It is almost as if I were seeing one of the be- 
lated processes of creation, looking as I do upon 
one of the primal forces of the earth; for it was 
with such forces that the Almighty Power (only 
with strength and fury ten thousand times more 
striking) wrought out the earth in the long ages 
before He gave man dominion over the finished 
work of creation — leveling the mountains, hol- 

7 



102 

lowing the sea-beds, and carving out the conti- 
nents after His pattern. 

It is fitting, then, that about these glaciers the 
clouds of Heaven should hover, now revealing 
and now concealing peak and valley and hillside; 
now leaving this valley in darkness while the ad- 
jjoining one is bright with sunshine; clouds now 
just at our feet, next at our side, next just above 
.^is. And amid these surroundings, August as it 
as, we look down the deep crevasse in the glacier, 
^reat cracks in the ice thirty or forty feet in 
^depth, hear the thunder of an occasional av- 
alanche of snow crashing down the mountain- 
sside, and ourselves play snow-ball with one an- 
other! And yet, strange to say, all those wonder- 
ful things long promised and predicted to happen 
"on a cold day in August" do not seem to have 
come true! 

More than this, "beyond the Alps lies Italy," 
and we are resting to-night at Brigue, preparatory 
to traveling by coach to-morrow across the fa- 
mous Simplon Pass, landing us at Domodossola in 
time to see the sun set in an Italian sky. 

European scenery is worth seeing. I would not 
say that it is grander than the Rockies, and for 
sheer loveliness 1 have not seen the equal of Cali- 
fornia, but the Alps have a glory such as few 
places on earth can equal and such as must for- 



103 

ever remain among the choicest memory-treasures 
of all who have the good fortune to see them. 

SWITZERLAND THE PUREST DEMOCRACY IN 
THE WORLD. 
Nor am I inclined to pass by the Swiss Govern- 
ment and people without a word about them, for 
especially in the form of government is there a 
striking similiarity between Switzerland and the 
United States. This little mountain country is 
perhaps, in fact, the purest democracy in the 
world, the same intense love of freedom that for 
centuries has made them honor the memory of 
William Tell with passionate devotion, exhibiting 
itself in the governmental machinery with .which 
the people work out their wishes. When the 
Swiss federal constitution was adopted a hundred 
years ago, the emphasis was left upon State sov- 
ereignty (as it seemed to have been left in a 
large measure in the American Constitution of 
1787). Then in 1847 (as in America in 1861) 
some of the States thought their rights imperiled 
and seceded, but in Switzerland, as with us, the 
principle of a strong and elfective national gov- 
ernment triumphed, and all traces of friction have 
long since subsided. Be it also said that in both 
countries constitutional amendments, adopted 
somewhat by force and irregularity, followed the 
conclusion of strife. 



104 

My purpose, however, is not so much to review 
Swiss history as to direct attention to the present 
form of government. Each State has a separate 
Constitution and Legislature as with us; there 
are Upper and Lower Houses of Congress elected 
much as we elect ours, but instead of one man as 
President with almost kingly power as we have, 
the Swiss Executive consists of a Federal Council 
of seven members. 

HOW DIRECT LEGISLATION WORKS. 

It really doesn't matter much, however, what 
sort of Legislatures or Congress or Council Switz- 
erland has, for with her unique plan of direct 
legislation all power is immediately in the hands 
of the people themselves — universal manhood suf- 
frage being in force. 

I know it is popular in some quarters to deride 
the initiative and the referendum on account of 
their unfamiliar names, popular among some in- 
telligent people to assume ignorance of these very 
simple and very effective methods of government; 
and other people, who get all their opinions 
second-hand, join in the chatter of opposition like 
the Banderlog monkeys in Kipling's Jungle Book. 
As a matter of cold fact and reason, however, 
direct legislation is nothing more nor less than 
the logical and inevitable conclusion of the prin- 



105 

ciple of democracy, and must appeal to every 
man who believes, as I do, that "the remedy for 
the evils of democracy is more democracy." 

What then is the Initiative? Nothing more 
nor less than that the people, without waiting for 
the aid or consent of any band of politicians or 
other powers that be, may "initiate" (that is, 
propose or inaugurate) any measure which they 
wish voted upon. There are more than three 
million people in Switzerland — about as many as 
in two average Southern States — and if 50,000 
people join in a petition for any new law, it must 
be submitted to popular vote at the following 
election. 

And the Referendum? This is all there is of it 
— simply that laws may be "referred" to the peo- 
ple for settlement. All Constitutional amend- 
ments must be so "referred" to the people for ac- 
tion, and more than this, if any Legislature or 
Congress passes a dangerous and unpopular bill, a 
certain percentage of the people by petition may 
require that it also be "referred" to popular vote 
for approval or rejection. 

This is direct legislation — the initiative and 
referendum — and in Switzerland it is working 
well, both in the separate States and in the Na- 
tional Government. Lowell in his admirable work 
on "Governments and Parties" correctly pro- 



106 

nounces the Swiss Confederation "the most suc- 
cessful democracy in the .world," with the most 
intelligent and contented citizenship and the most 
economical and efficient government in all Europe* 
Early in June, while our own Southern States 
were still agitated over the Prohibition question, 
the Swiss people had up for settlement the ques- 
tion of prohibiting the manufacture and sale of 
absinthe, an especially dangerous and hurtful in- 
toxicant, the referendum going against the fur- 
ther sale of the drink. 

HOW THE INITIATIVE AND REFERENDUM 
WOULD HELP AMERICA. 
While the principle of direct legislation could 
not be applied in American National affairs, except 
upon very momentous questions, there ought to be 
some such way by which, for example, the people 
could make their wishes effective in such matters 
as the popular election of Senators, while all Con- 
stitutional amendments, of course, ought to be 
submitted to popular vote. And in our State and 
municipal governments there is great room for the 
expansion of the direct legislation idea. Many a 
corrupt boss and ringster in our cities — and in 
some of our rural counties as well — would find 
himself reduced to the painful necessity of earning 
a living by honest means, if the people held the 



107 

whip hand in government all the time as they 
should do if able to take any matter from the 
hands of an unworthy Board of Commissioners 
or Aldermen; or if these voters might also at any 
time force a vote upon any important public re- 
form which the bosses had chosen to ignore or 
delay. 

Several years ago Oregon, after a great fight 
led by one determined, resourceful champion (I 
believe his name is U'Ren) put the principle of di- 
rect legislation into her Constitution; and at tha 
State election there two months ago about a dozen 
important measures were voted on, the system giv- 
ing entire satisfaction to everybody — except the 
old bosses. And now Oklahoma in our Southland,, 
with a progressiveness that promises well for her 
future, has followed Oregon and put the initiative, 
and referendum into her permanent State Consti- 
tution. 

It has long been a matter of regret with me that 
when Senator Tillman and his followers undertook 
the re-making of politics and government in South 
Carolina and the general broadening of democracy 
in the Palmetto State, they did not set about, 
having the people pass directly upon measures 
rather than men — or at least upon measures as 
more important than men. In almost every case 
a man represents a variety of attitudes toward a 



108 

variety of subjects, and the judgment of the peo- 
ple concerning the principles for which he stands 
is so warped and excited by his personal qualities 
and by extraneous prejudices and emotions, that 
the expression of democracy through such means 
is entirely inadequate. 

Oklahoma and Oregon are pioneers among 
States as Switzerland among nations. The samo 
forces that rejected monarchies and set up the 
incomplete democracies of our time will continue 
to lengthen their cords and strengthen their 
stakes. Given an intelligent electorate such as 
are the Swiss with their magnificent school sys- 
tem — one of the best in Europe — and direct legis- 
lation is the most effective means of promoting 
public virtue and increasing the eflaciency of gov- 
ernment as the agent of the people. 



XII. 
"The Grandeur That Was Rome." 

Rome, Italy. 

*'Rome!" 

How many millions of men and women, how 
many generations long dead and forgotten, how 
many tribes and tongues and nations, have heard 
the word: sometimes with terror, sometimes with 
pride, but always with an interest such as no other 
name in all history can conjure up: Rome, the 
Eternal City! 

ROME, THE ETERNAL CITY! 
Standing yesterday in the Forum my mind went 
back, back, back through nineteen centuries of 
time — past Washington and Napoleon and Crom- 
well and Columbus and Luther and Charlemagne 
and Alaric and Constantine and Nero — until I 
paused in fatigue at the very day-dawn of the 
Christian Era itself — and yet, there still was 
Rome, imperial, unrivalled, the mistress of the 
world: — • 

''And it came to pass in those days that 
there went out a decree from Caesar Au- 
gustus that all the world should be taxed." 

"Caesar Augustus" — one man — commanded; 

"all the world" obeyed. From the Pillars of Her- 



110 

cules on the west to the Persian Gulf on the east 
the marvelous machinery of the Roman Govern- 
ment, the greatest that the world had known, 
was set in motion; and in far away Palestine, 
Joseph, a carpenter of Nazareth, and his wife an- 
swered the summons that all tritoes obeyed and 
went up to Bethlehem at that first of all Christ- 
mas-tides. 

Thus it was that where my fatigued memory 
halted — at a date nineteen centuries old — a 
decree of the Roman Emperor changed the 
birthplace of the Saviour of Mankind; and Rome 
was even then hoary with age. Centuries had 
come and gone, empires had risen and fallen, 
since her history had emerged from the legendary 
period of wolf-suckled Romulus and Remus, and 
of the heroic Horatii and Curatii. The world-old 
struggle of the masses for equality, the world-old 
contest between wealth and democracy, had been 
fought out: a century and a half the plebeians or 
common people had struggled for equal political 
rights, for the fair distribution of public lands, 
for freedom from oppressive taxation, for just 
law^s for the poor and for the debtor. Tribe after 
tribe and nation after nation had humbled them- 
selves before the Roman eagles; proud Carthage 
itself after a struggle so brave as to win the ad- 
miration of the ages, had become a desolate ruin; 



Ill 

and even far-away Britain had acknowledged the^ 
flag of all the all-conquering Empire. 

It is hard for me to realize, even with all the 
ruins around me, that 1 am here where all this 
world-history was made, here where was the 
heart and brain of human society from whence 
went throbbing forth those impulses of govern- 
ment and of intelligence that not only affected 
all mankind in those long-gone days, but have 
profoundly influenced all succeeding generations 
of men. Upon this narrow stage to which I have 
come the world's mightiest dramas have been 
acted and the world's mightiest names have won 
their renown. "The stones in the streets her& 
have heard the footsteps of Caesar and these- 
walls have echoed the eloquence of Cicero and 
Antony." i 

THE MIGHTIEST MAN WHO EVER TROD THIS 
EARTH OF OURS. 

Let us look about us for a moment. 

The same Caesar Augustus as whose subject 
our Lord was born is represented here by more 
than one ruinous mass, and traces of the work of 
his mighty uncle, the immortal Julius, are also 
here before us. Not only are the outlines of the 
Basilica Julia which he had begun still shown the 
tourist, but here is the "Temple of Caesar" on; 



112 

the spot where he erected a new oratorical tribune 
and from which his own funeral was held — Mark 
Antony from the rostrum delivering that incom- 
parably adroit, eloquent and powerful oration 
which did indeed all but "move the stones of 
Home to rise and mutiny." 

My mind turns from the funeral scene, how- 
ever, to the times v/hen Caesar in the Forum and 
Capitol here, "bestrode this narrow world like a 
Colossus"— the foremost man of all the earth. I 
may not go so far as to say with John Fiske that 
"we ought to be thankful to Caesar every day 
that we live," but the tribute of F. Marion Craw- 
ford is perhaps not too high: 

"Of all great men who have leaped upon 
the world as upon an unbroken horse, who 
liave guided it with relentless hands, and 
ridden it breathless to the goal of glory. 
Caesar is the only one who turned the race 
into the track of civilization and, dying, left 
mankind a future in the memory of his past. 
He is the one great man of all without whom 
it is impossible to imagine history." 

THE OLD MEMORIES OF THE FORUM. 

The stones of this Forum, however, whisper 

tales to us that had grown mystic with the glamor 

of seven centuries of time even when the young 

Julius Caesar, two thousand years ago, first felt 

his blood quicken at their rehearsal. 



113 

They show you here i.iio fabled grave of Rom- 
ulug. 

They show you memorials erected in honor of 
victories in the Punic Wars — that terrible conflict 
lasting through four generations of men and 
more than a century of time in which Rome and 
Carthage struggled for the mastery of the world, 
struggled with the fierce knowledge that one or 
the other must die the death, the contest ending 
on the part of Rome with something of the cold 
and remorseless brutality with which a wild beast 
wearies out the life of his doomed quarry. 

Here runs the Sacred Way over which vic- 
torious Roman generals, coming home with cap- 
tive princes at their chariot wheels, were honored 
almost as gods, the slave beside them not without 
reason whispering the monitory words: "Remem- 
ber, thou art but mortal!" 

It is useless, however, for me to attempt to de- 
scribe even the more notable of the historic Ro- 
man ruins. Yonder is the Tarpeian Rock from 
which the aristocrats flung Marcus Manlius be- 
cause of his championship of the rights of the 
people. Sunday I went into the Mamertine Prison 
in which St. Peter and St. Paul are said to have 
been confined, and from which St. Paul, brought 
before Nero a second time, and foreseeing per- 
haps the martyrdom he is said later to have suf- 



114 

fered, wrote his last message tc his beloved Tim- 
othy: 

"For I am now ready to be offered and 
the time of my departure is at hand. I have 
fought a good fight, I have finished my 
course, I have kept the faith; henceforth is 
laid up for me a crown of righteousness." 

THE COLOSSEUM AND THE MARTYRS. 
We have been, too, to the Colosseum, where 
70,000 of the converts and followers of the early 
Apostles gave their lives for their faith. "The 
gate of death" through which their mangled 
corpses were dragged is still shown, and there 
comes to mind the pen-picture drawn by P. Ma- 
rion Crawford of the days when before eighty 
thousand brutal men and women, these Christian 
martyrs were brought forth to be torn by wild 
beasts — slender girls among them with fair faces, 
young men who were not afraid to die, grown 
m.en and women leaving children orphaned and 
friendless, and old men and women with white 
hair and wrinkled faces: all condemned by mon- 
sters who respected neither age nor sex, and all 
willing to die for the Master whose name they 
had taken: 

"And then the wildest, deadliest howl of 
all on that day; a handful of men and wo- 
men in white, and one girl in the midst of 
them; the clang of an iron gate thrown sud- 



115 

"denly open; a rushing and leaping of great 
lithe bodies of beasts, yellow and black and 
striped, the sand flying in clouds behind 
them, a worrying and crushing of flesh and 

bones sharp cries, then blood, then 

silence .... the wild beasts driven out with 
brands and red-hot irons step by step, drag- 
ging nameless mangled things in their jaws." 

It is interesting to speculate as to what per- 
centage of us who call ourselves Christians now, 
would have been willing to die for our faith in 
the days of that terrible persecution, or how 
many of us would even have been willing to en- 
dure the every-day gibes and insults which the 
early converts had to bear. Over on the Palatine 
Hill yesterday our guide told us of a drawing 
found on the walls there: a caricature of Christ 
on the cross with the head of an ass for that of 
Jesus. It was insults such as these that the early 
Christians had to endure. 

HOW THE EARLY CHURCH DEGENERATED. 
The rapid degeneracy of the Church after the 
fourth century, however, is also suggested as we 
visit the edifice in which the Emperor Constantine 
is said to have been baptized. Christianity be- 
coming the religion of the rulers, it became easy 
and popular as paganism had formerly been. "The 
pagan Empire became Christian," as one historian 
well says, "but the Christian Church became, to 



116 

some degree, imperial and pagan. The gain enor- 
mously exceeded the loss; hut there did take 
place, naturally and inevitably, a sweeping change 
from the earlier Christianity." Christianity be- 
came formal as Paganism had been; it began per- 
secutions as cruel as Paganism had practiced. 

"Christian bishops began to adopt the gor- 
geous ceremonial of the pagan worship. The 
burning of incense, the laying on of hands, 
the sprinkling T^fith holy water, the confes- 
sion of sins to the priest, the processions, the 
decoration of images, the prostrations before 
the priest, etc., etc., are all in their origin 
pagan observances Christianity hav- 
ing thus become pagan in outward form, 
gradually lost its inner life. The spirit of 
Christ no longer inspired it. Popes, en- 
throned at Rome, were more concerned with 
politics than with religion; more eager to 
acquire power than to save souls. The dream 
of Catholic empire had seized them, and they 
aspired to erect anew the throne of the 
Caesars. .... The Pope being thus am- 
bitious, the Church sought wealth, offices, 
places of influence on every hand. The 
princes of the Church became as worldly and 
as arrogant as the princes of the State. They 
led armies, they built palaces, they lived dis- 
solute lives. Duty was almost a forgotten 
word." 

Going on in degeneracy until the Pope began 
to sell indulgences in order to pay off the enor- 
mous debt incurred in building St. Peter's here, 
Martin Luther and other leaders of the Reforma- 



117 

tion aroused all Christendom with a plea for 
primitive Christian ideals, and started a move- 
ment which not only created new sects, but stop- 
ped many vicious tendencies in the old organiza- 
tion as well. 

Such are some snapshots of Rome and of the 
history they call up; but this letter is less satis- 
factory than any other that I have written. I am 
trying to write of Rome in one article — and one 
would not have space enough in a dozen books. '. 

Saturday I sail from Naples for home. The 
next — and probably the last — of my letters from 
abroad, will deal with some further impressions 
of Rome and some general observations on Euro- 
pean as contrasted with American life. 



XIII. 

What Rome and Pompeii Can 
Teach Us. 

Naples^ Italy. 
Yesterday we left Rome, and to-day finds me 
in Naples, but not even the beauty of its "blue 
Vesuvian bay" and of the surrounding moun- 
tains, has sufficed to break the spell of the Eternal 
€ity. My mind still goes back to the seat of the 
greatest empire of all history, and to the mighty 
figures who once trod the ways over which I have 
walked these last few days. The world may 
:stand a million years, but their deeds will not be 
forgotten, and the words "July" and "August" 
^^ill not endure longer than the. fame of Julius 
and Augustus Caesar in whose honor these months 
were named. 

WHAT MADE THE ROMAN GREAT. 
But what gave Rome its greatness? This is a 
pertinent inquiry — especially pertinent for us in 
America who dream dreams of a like leadership 
among the nations of the earth, and pertinent for 
lis in the South who would have our section con- 
tribute its full share to the greatness of our com- 
mon country. And the answer is one that per- 



119 

haps may give us more cause for pause and for 
thought than for pride. 

Unquestionably, more than anything else, the 
quality that made the Roman great was regard 
for law. He could make law and obey law; and 
because he could, he won dominion over ten thou- 
sand tribes that lacked this power, 

"The merit of the Greek was his indi- 
viduality; of the Roman, his submission to 
law Resolutely the Italian surrender- 
ed his own personal will for the sake of free- 
dom, and learned to obey his father that he 
might know: how to obey the State." 

More loudly then than about anything else does 
Rome speak to us in appeal for respect for law, 
the rock on which she built her greatness — and 
it is a lesson that we in this day of lynching, 
night-riding, and mob outbreaks shall do well to 
take to heart. 

With his mother's milk indeed did the young 
Roman imbibe this spirit. He was born into a 
home in which the father ruled, with affection, of 
course, but with authority unquestioned over both 
wife and children. And this authority lasted aa 
long as life itself. A father^could refuse even a 
grown son or daughter the right to buy, sell or 
acquire any property; all their earnings belonged 
to the father, if he chose to take them; and he 
could imprison or scourge a son without any court 



120 

or officer having right to interfere, — much the 
same power with regard to the wife being also 
his. 

HOW RESPECT FOR LAW BROUGHT DO- 
MINION OVER THE LAWLESS. 
Under such conditions, the young Roman, from 
his very infancy, learned obedience to authority, 
and he grew up with a regard for law and order 
that made him the ruler of the world. Master of 
himself, he became master of every tribe that had 
not learned the ancient lesson of obedience and 
restraint; for always the mob must go down be- 
fore the onslaught of disciplined troops, and al- 
ways the people who give way to mob rule must 
surrender to the people who unflinchingly ''render 
unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's." In 
Rome the ideal citizen was stern Brutus who as 
judge could sentence his own son to death for 
infraction of the law he had sworn to enforce; and 
almost the only outbreaks of the mob I recall in 
Rome were those against rulers who seemed to 
be taking the law into their own hands or exer- 
cising power beyond their authority. 

If we forget everything else about Rome, there- 
fore, let us not forget this: It was regard for 
law, more than any other one quality, that gave 
her greatness. 



121 

In other countries and cities in ancient times 
tlie poorer folk rose in violence now and then to 
demand their rights — and then were beaten back 
only to find their last state worse than their first. 
But in Rome the plebeians fought their way to in- 
dependence and to leadership by legal and orderly 
means, and at length won the coveted prize. 
Gradually they won citizenship, then limited suf- 
frage, then the right of veto, then the right of le- 
gal intermarriage with the patricians, and then 
the slow abolition of many special privileges long 
enjoyed by the aristocrats. 

THE GREATEST WORK OP JULIUS CAESAR. 
There are no nobler figures in history than the 
Gracchi, the earliest reformers who gave their 
lives in this long struggle for the rights of the 
people. The public lands had been gobbled up by 
the wealthy classes, and as the penalty for their 
efforts to get a fair distribution, the two brothers 
in the end gave up their lives. It was Julius 
Caesar more than any other man who finally 
wrested from the Roman plutocracy its unfair ad- 
vantages, and in this work he proved himself even 
greater as a constructive statesman than he was 
as a conqueror, and won for himself his greatest 
claim to undying fame and honor. The nobles 
who had stolen great estates from the public lands 



122 

had to give way to small farmers under Caesar's 
homestead law. Immense slave plantations, crush- 
ing out free labor and degrading it, had been the 
rule, but Caesar decreed that every landlord 
should use at least one-third free labor. Finding 
interest sometimes as high as 48 per cent, Caesar 
reduced it to 12 per cent maximum, and also 
abolished slavery for debt. Finding idle capital- 
ists living on usury, he decreed that they must in- 
vest at least one-half their money in real estate, 
and also that no man should hoard more than $3,- 
000. Realizing that the burdens of taxation were 
not equally distributed, he laid heavy customs du- 
ties upon articles of luxury imported by the rich. 
Seeing menace to the empire in provinces gov- 
erned arbitrarily from Rome, he gave home rule 
to them all. More than this, Caesar found Rome 
with only 450,000 of her people allowed to vote 
and extended the franchise to over 4,000,000^ 
thus insuring the permanence of the reforms he 
had instituted for the benefit of the masses. 

HOW EQUITY AND TOLERANCE PROMOTED 
ROMAN SUPREMACY. 
And I should say that next to the Roman re- 
gard for law, nothing else contributed so much to 
her greatness as this growing recognition of the 
rights of the common man, and the steady increase 



123 

of legal checks upon the rapacity of her Rockefel- 
lers and Harrimans and Goulds. All Roman his- 
tory sheds light upon our own public problems, 
and in so far as they are attempting to curb 
predatory wealth, Roosevelt in the Republican 
Party, and Bryan in the Democratic, and Watson 
in the Populist, in America to-day, are fighting 
battles as old as the memory of Caesar. 

There is another source of Roman greatness 
that I should not fail to mention along with her 
regard for law and her checks upon plutocracy, 
and that is her tolerance of all religious sects — 
a record marred only by a few bloody years of 
persecution of the early Christians. No one who 
travels through Europe and sees how the persecu- 
tion of the Huguenots enfeebled France, and how 
the Inquisition gave Spain hopeless dry rot, and 
how religious warfare held back Germany for 
centuries and laid waste many of its fairest 
provinces — no one seeing all this can fail to ap- 
preciate how much her freedom from religious in- 
tolerance meant to Roman supremacy. This point 
can not be too strongly emphasized. 

GOOD ROADS STRENGTHENED THE EMPIRE. 

And then in the fourth and last place, I would 

mention as one of the main bulwarks of Roman 

strength her magniacent system of public high- 



124 

ways. A few days ago I went out over the world- 
famous Appian Way, a road built by Appius 
Claudius in 312 B. C, and over whicb therefore 
ten generations had already come and gone when 
Christ was born. I can not do better here than 
to quote from a modern historian, referring as 
he does to this same Appian Way and to the great 
good roads system of which it was a part: 

"Afterward all Italy, and then the grow- 
ing empire outside Italy, was traversed by a 
net-work of such roads. Nothing was per- 
mitted to obstruct or divert their course. 
Mountains were tunneled, rivers bridged, 
marshes spanned by miles of viaducts of mas- 
onry. They were smoothly paved with huge 
slabs, over some two feet of gravel, to the 
width of eighteen feet, making the best 
means of communication the world was to 
see until the time of railroads. They were 
so carefully constructed, too, that their re- 
mains, in good condition to-day, still 'mark 
the lands where Rome has ruled.' Primarily 
they were designed for military purposes; 
but of course they facilitated all inter- 
course and helped to bind Italy together so- 
cially." 

IN THE BURIED CITY OP POMPEII. 

But here I am in Naples, and however reluct- 
ant I am to do so, time and space demand that I 
take my thoughts away from Rome. Naples itself 
is certainly worthy of a paragraph, its beautiful 
location and environment having given rise to the 



125 

popular saying, "See Naples and die." After 
traversing its foul and squalid streets, however, I 
am more impressed by the parallel remark of 
quite a different tenor made by a lady in our 
party — • 

"Smell Naples and die." 

What has interested me far more than Naples 
itself is the buried city of Pompeii which I have 
visited to-day. Pompeii was a town about the 
size of Raleigh, Columbia, Montgomery, or Jack- 
son — 20,000 to 30,000 people — and the eruption 
from Vesuvius that buried it in ashes and destroy- 
ed the lives of probably 10,000 people, took place 
more than eighteen hundred years ago: at a time 
when men who had seen the Christ were yet alive 
and when the old gods — Fortuna, Mercury, and 
Jupiter — were yet worshipped here in temples 
which have only been brought to light within the 
last century. 

I have seen few more interesting places in all 
Europe than this piece of artificially preserved 
antiquity. Of course, Rome is older than Pom- 
peii, but the difference is that the ancient in Rome 
has had several coatings of the modern super- 
added, while in Pompeii time has preserved ah 
ancient town for us in its natural colors. There 
are temples in Rome, for example, in which the 
old Graeco-Roman gods were once worshipped. 



126 

but for centuries now they have acknowledged the 
supremacy of Christianity, while in Pompeii here 
the last services held were by men and women 
who knew nothing of the true God and to whom 
Christianity was a new and contemptible doctrine, 
its founder executed like a common criminal with- 
in the life-time of many who scorned it. 

THE MOST STRIKING LESSON OF POMPEIIAN 
LIFE. 

But what impressed me most about Pompeii 
was just this: That people of wealth lived in as 
much comfort and luxury then as now; it is only 
the common man, the poor man, whom the eigh- 
teen centuries since have helped. Go into the 
spacious palaces along the main streets of Pom- 
peii, v/ith their wide halls, magnificent mural 
paintings, beautiful courts, elegant bath-rooms, 
banquet halls and parlors, and you will realize 
that not even on Fifth Avenue to-day do our mil- 
lionaires live in greater comfort than did the 
"four hundred" of ancient Pompeii. 

The progress of civilization these last eighteen 
hundred years therefore has done little to raise 
the standard of living and comfort for the excep- 
tional man, but what it has done has been to 
raise the common man immeasurably nearer the 
comforts which only the extremely fortunate then 
enjoyed. 



127 

The great masses of people were then only bur- 
den-bearers for the privileged classes; millions of 
them were slaves, and I saw to-day the figures of 
many of the slaves (some white, some black) 
who were burned to death in that awful holocaust 
centuries ago. Every century since has seen 
more and more of the common people raised from 
slavery and poverty to independence and comfort, 
and in this fact alone we have the key-note of 
civilization, the master-purpose of all progress, 
the symphony of the ages. 

THE MORAL PROGRESS OF MANKIND AND 
ITS EXPLAN'ATION. 
There is another lesson that my visit to Pompeii 
has carried home to me, and that is the moral 
progress of mankind since the destruction of this 
Italian city. In the gorgeous palaces here — right 
in the doorways where the most elegant women 
of Pompeii passed in their social calls and their 
elaborate social functions — are pictures painted 
by gifted artists and yet so vulgar that not even 
the lowest-browed negro in the South would per- 
mit them in his home to-day. The foremost citi- 
zens of Rome and Pompeii then practiced im- 
moralities and countenanced vulgarities such as 
our crudest mining towns would not now tolerate; 
and both in the Colosseum and the palaces of the 



12S 

Roman Emperors themselves I have seen the 
vomitoriums into which the society leaders of the 
Empire, having eaten to satiety, would retire and 
disgorge themselves in order to eat again — an ex- 
ample of beastliness that I should hardly have be- 
lieved possible. 

I leave Pompeii then — and Europe, too, for I 
sail for home to-morrow — with the thought of 
how the spirit of Christianity, hampered though 
it has been by many pagan survivals and a thou- 
sand shackling influences of man's device, has 
nevertheless worked steadily through all these 
generations, not only for this lifting up of the 
common man from slavery to manhood and inde- 
pendence, but also for the elevation of the moral 
standards of the race from the vulgarity and 
hopelessness of ancient paganism to the purity 
and aspiration of our modern Christian faith. 

From the standpoint of the student of history 
ivho once gets a glimpse of how the world lived 
and thought twenty centuries ago, it is undeniable 
that in this Faith we have the best heritage that 
the ages have bequeathed to us, the great guide 
and anchor that all ancient civilizations lacked, 
the standard and criterion in default of which 
they drifted in uncertainty, and the vision in the 
absence of which they perished. 



XIV. 
How. the South May Win Leadership. 

On board S. S. Creiic, White Star Line. 

Europe is now behind me, and for ten days now 
vv^e have been upon the high seas, going as fast as 
our mighty engines can carry us on the long, long 
way from Naples to New York. There are yet 
three more days of the voyage. 

But the trip has not seemed long — all too short, 
in fact; and there is general regret on shipboard 
that we are not to be out for a full week longer. 
Certain it is that few travelers have ever been 
more favored in the matter of weather than we 
have been; and the joy of ocean traveling, as 
everybody knows, depends largely upon the 
weather. 

A GLORIOUS SEA VOYAGE. 

Barring a heavy summer shower while we were 
anchored at the Azores, we have had only fair 
days and blue skies, with breeze enough most of 
the time to make the temperature delightful and 
sunsets more gorgeous than are ever seen on land, 
because the most glorious tints are nearest the 
horizon and obstructions on land prevent one's 
seeing these in all their beauty. But it is at night 
that the spell and charm and mystery of the sea 



130 

are most potent, and always to artist and poet the 
thought of the sea suggests the moonlight upon 
its unresting bosom. Here again we have been 
peculiarly favored, for the moon was new just be- 
fore we left Naples and is now at the full, and to 
sit out at night upon the upper deck with the 
open sky above you, and the moonlight upon the 
waves as far as the eye reach — well, this is almost 
enough to wring poetry out of a wooden Indian. 

Nobody has been seasick, so far as I have ob- 
served; and, in fact, pur party has come to the 
conclusion that sea-sickness is by no means such 
a terror as it is commonly believed to be. As one 
of my friends remarked: "Think what a fool I 
liave been! Here I have waited ten years to come 
across, dreading the ocean voyage, when it is real- 
ly the finest part of the whole trip!" 

And now that both Europe and America are far 
away — so far away that we can almost doubt the 
■existence of any land at all — it is the best time 
that I shall ever have perhaps for contrasting the 
Old World and the New, my purpose being to see 
what we of the new countries can learn from our 
Tluropean fatherlands. 

THE TWO GREATEST LESSONS EUROPE 

TEACHES US. 
Be it said then in the beginning, that this trip 
lias made me gladder than ever that I am an 



131 

American, much as it has taught me of the su- 
perior industrial methods of many European peo- 
ples. If we learn — 

( 1 ) To care for our resources as well as Europe 
cares for hers, and— 

(2) To educate our people as well as Germany 
educates her, 

the time must soon come (as we count time in 
the lives of nations) when the United States will 
stand the acknowledged leader among the coun- 
tries of the world. My ambition is that we of the 
South, before this achievement is consummated, 
shall make our section the foremost section of the 
United States, and therefore the foremost section 
of what must become the foremost nation of the 
earth. 

It is a high ambition, and yet it does not seem 
to me too high for us to set up as a working ideal. 
We belong to a race that has won the mastery of 
the world, and to the best branches of that race. 
I have commented in former letters upon the re- 
markable similarity of the names seen and heard 
in English and Southern towns — ten times as 
many familiar surnames on the business signs as 
English towns as I should find in New York or 
Boston — and this is but one evidence of the oft- 
repeated fact that the purest Anglo-Saxon blood in 



132 

America is in the South. English, Scotch, Dutch, 
German — from the masterful Teutonic races our 
blood has come; and our citizenship has not been 
diluted by long decades of immigration from 
Southern and Eastern Europe. Immensely to the 
advantage of the South in the long struggle for 
supremacy must be this fact. 

THE SPIRITUAL FACTOR IN RACIAL GREAT- 
NESS. 
It must also be to our advantage that more 
largely perhaps in the Cotton States than in any 
other section of the world to-day is the old Book 
of Books accepted as the unquestioned moral and 
spiritual criterion. Much more strongly Puritan 
now than even New England itself, the South is 
learning what New England did not learn in time 
• — how to combine the sterling uprightness of 
Puritanism with the warmth and beauty of mod- 
ern culture. To keep the stronger virtues of 
Puritanism and yet hold on to tolerance and hos- 
pitality and joyousness — this is the character 
which, it seems to me, the South should set itself 
to develop as typical of the Southerner; and for 
the qualities requisite to this consummation the 
Southern man is noted. That we have gener- 
osity, geniality, and hospitality is unquestioned; 
and that an unusual religious instinct is also ours 



it takes but a little observation in other sections 
to prove. I have traveled from the Atlantic to 
the Pacific in America, and now in most of the 
leading European countries, and nowhere have I 
found Sunday observed as it is in the South, the 
€hurch in such favor, or religion so much a part 
of the people's lives. It will be well indeed if the 
Church with us shall recognize its great oppor- 
tunity, shall lend itself to the occasion, and make 
itself the mightiest factor in the production of 
that ideal character of which I have been writing 
• — the character which will combine the unswerv- 
ing uprightness of the Puritan with Hlq warmth 
and geniality for which the Southerner is already 
•distinguished. 

I mention thi^ matter at some length because 
the church has an opportunity in the South such 
as it has hardly anywhere else in the world, and 
because upon its use of this opportunity depends! 
in a large measure the future rank of our section. 
It is not sentimentalism, is not a mere pious gen- 
eralization, but it is the truth of history that no 
people can achieve and maintain greatness except 
by adherence to rigid moral standards. When the 
old Psalmist said centuries ago, "Happy is that 
people whose God is the Lord," he was preaching 
as good politics as religion. 



^ 



134 

"KNOWLEDGE IS POWER"— AND IT IS PwEAD 
OP ALL MEN. 

There is another thing, as I intimated in the be- 
beginning, to which we must give attention, and 
that is the thorough education of our people. The 
surest sign of promise for our future in all our re- 
cent history is the campaign for better schools 
which has made such wonderful progress in the 
South these last ten years. By the time I reached 
Italy, after traveling in half a dozen other Euro- 
pean countries, I had been so much impressed by 
the way in which education makes itself felt in 
every line of commerce and industry that I ex- 
claimed: *'A careful observer, with a few years 
of travel, ought to be able to guess a country's 
percentage of illiteracy, simply by an hour's ride 
tlirough the farms or the towns!" 

And this is hardly an exaggeration. The hope 
of the South is in the education of its people, all 
its people. Every ignorant, inefficient man, white 
or black, in a community makes it poorer, makes 
everybody in the community poorer; and if he can 
not be educated to do good work, he ought to give 
way to some one who can be so trained. If the 
South's sons are illiterate, if your sons are illiter- 
ate, no other qualities can save them from defeat 
in the fierce industrial struggle of to-day. Our 



135 

aim should be to spend still more money on our 
schools and to make them train more and more 
for actual life, while the work of experiment sta- 
tions, farmers* institutes, demonstration workers, 
farm papers, etc., in educating the older farmers 
who have passed out of the schools, ought also' to 
have the fullest encouragement a people can give, 

AMERICA IS TOO WASTEFUL. 

There is one other thing, moreover, to which 
we can not give too earnest heed, and that is the 
conservation of our natural resources. I have 
mentioned this in a previous letter; but I was re- 
minded of it again yesterday when a distinguished 
Pennsylvanian on our boat told me of his son's 
trip to Germany last year as the representative 
of a leading American industrial institution seek- 
ing information as to the methods of its compet- 
itors abroad. What the young American found 
and reported was this: that the American factory 
ha.d the advantage in nearness and cheapness of 
raw material, in the thoroughness and efficiency 
of machinery and equipment, and also in the skill 
and intelligence of its workmen, and there was 
but one thing in which the European excelled — 
economy. The American factory was more waste- 
ful. 

Of almost everything the same thing is true. 
Lands, forests, mines, — all are handled with great- 



er care and economy in Europe than in Americar 
and millions of people make a living from indus-^ 
tries that our people would laugh at as impossi- 
ble. In Antwerp I saw the ragged bales of cot-- 
ton from the South unloaded at the wharves — ■ 
cotton bought at 8 or 10 cents a pound; but the- 
ladies of our party tell me that when the lace-- 
makers whom I saw working there get through 
with it, it brings from $5 to $50 a pound. If 
the South would only utilize its wasted resources 
and neglected opportunities — well, there would 
be no limit to our possibilities. 

EUROPE TEN TIMES AS THICKLY SETTLED- 
AS THE SOUTH. 
In this connection, I wonder if it has ever oa- 
cnrred to the reader that the eleven Southerir 
States excluding Texas — that is to say, Virginia, 
North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, 
Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Ar- 
kansas, and Oklahoma — have a larger area than 
Great Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, Holland' 
and Switzerland combined, and if these ten South- 
ern States were as thickly settled as those foreign 
countries, their population would be 160,a00-,000 
instead of 16,000,000? Imagine nine other fam- 
ilies added to each and every one family you now 
know in your neighborhood, and you will get some 
idea as to the density of population. You might 



I5f 

cro^d all the people in the United States to-daf 
into Texas, and it would not he so thickly settle(i 
as Great Britain. 

THE BOTTOM PACTS ABOUT IMMIGRATION'. 
It is partly because of this European over-* 
crowding, of course, that they have such a constant 
stream of emigration to America; and in ther- 
steerage below me now are hundreds of Southern 
Italians — men, women, and children — reinforced 
by some scores of others taken on at the Azores 
Islands: all on their way to crowd the slums of 
aur American cities and td tax the assimilative^ 
energies of the American nation. This is the 
real trouble about imrtiigration — that it has utter- 
ly changed in character these last twenty-five or 
thirty years. Formerly most of the immigrants 
came from England, Scotland, Ireland, Germany, 
Holland, Norway, Sweden, etc., — Teutonic peoples 
largely, whose fusion through intermarriage has' 
produced our strong, forceful American type; and 
classes whose coming, with our present scarcity of 
population in the South, would not be to our dis- 
advantage. But for several years past our immi-^ 
grants have been chiefly Italians, Russians, Hun- 
garians, Poles, and other degenerate stocks, not 
easily assimilable nor easily fired with American 
ideals. This is the menace in present-day immi-- 



138 

gration; and what I have seen of the dirty, chat^ 
tering lot of Italians on the decks below us has 
not decreased my sense of its seriousness. But I 
think the South should welcome new-comers of 
bur own stock — Germans, English, Scotch, French^ 
etc., — certainly in the small numbers that they 
would come to us under the most favorable cir- 
cumstances, and especially from the northwestern 
section of the United States. 

MY DREAM OP THE SOIJTH*S AWAKENING^. 

Already this letter has grown too long, and 1 
tQust bring it to a close, and with it, my impres* 
sions of Europe. Our ship is even now sailing in-^ 
to the sunset, and not many hours hence I shall be 
once again beneath the Stars and Stripes — and 
you can not fail to love "Old Glory" better foi' 
having wandered on a foreign strand — and soon 
thereafter in the thick of things in our Southland* 
to which alone, of all parts of the earth, can any 
ardent Southerner give his whole heart. Even in 
far-away Europe the South's call for the service 
of her sons has been always in my ears, and al- 
ways my uppermost thought has been to see and 
to report, not the merely curious of interesting 
things, but the things from which our people may 
learn lessons that will help in Southern develop- 
ment. 

I have not written therefore, I repeat, of the 



139 

merely curious objects, nor have I written of the 
wonders of art and sculpture that I have seen — 
nothing of Raphael's work or Titian's or Murillo's 
or Michael Angelo's, nothing even of the latter's 
magnificent statues at the de Medici tombs, though 
I gave the better part of two afternoons to enjoy- 
ing them. I cannot describe any of these master- 
pieces adequately if I should try, and 'deep as is 
the impression some of them made upon me, even 
deeper is the longing for the time when out of 
our own Southland shall come artists and sculp- 
tors and poets — great souls of genius and talent 
with vision clear enough and feelings sensitive 
enough to body forth in imperishable form, or in 
still more truly imperishable song, the romance 
of our ante-bellum civilization, the tragedy of our 
Civil War, the epic of our rebuilding, the patient 
ideals and visions which must yet give us a great 
future. 

A BETTER AGRICULTURE THE ONLY FOUN- 
DATION UPON WHICH WE CAN BUILD. 
And once again would I say that we cannot 
have these finer things without first having the 
more substantial. Culture in a democracy must 
be based upon a prosperous and intelligent aver- 
age man. We cannot have the splendors of dome 
and tower unless we first go down into the earth 
and lay deep the foundations of our structure. 



We cannot have the American Beauty rose unless 
we first give attention to the prosaic, every-day 
earth in which it grows. Sidney Lianier never said 
a truer thing than when he declared thirty years 
ago that — 

"One has only to remember, particularly 
here in America, whatever crop we hope to 
reap in the future, — whether it he a crop of 
poems, of paintings, of symphonies, of consti- 
tuional safeguards, of virtuous behaviors, of 
religious exaltation, — we have got to bring it 
out of the ground with palpable plows and 
with plain farmer's forethought, in order to 
see that a vital revolution in the farming 
economy of the South, if it is actually occur- 
ring, is necessarily carrying with it all future 
Southern politics and Southern relations and 
Soutliern art, and that, therefore, such an 
agricultural change is the one substantial 
fact upon which any really new South can be 
predicated." 

Europe is behind me. To it belongs the past. 
America and the South await me. To them be- 
long the future. If some lessons from the Euro- 
pean past which I have learned and of which I 
have written shall contribute in any measure to- 
ward making our Southern future more worthy 
of our people and of their ideals and opportun- 
ities, my purpose will have been attained and the 
keenest pleasure that can come from my trip will, 
tiave been realized. 



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